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How to Work with Presentations Coaches

Module by: The Cain Project in Engineering and Professional Communication

Presentations coaches are Rice students who have been trained to rehearse student presentations, providing feedback on content, delivery, visuals, and question-handling. Coaches understand the basic principles of good presentations, but they will be better able to assist your students in fulfilling your educational objectives if you follow the advice in this handout.

Send coaches your assignment, your presentation evaluation form, and a description of your expectations before the coaches begin meeting with your students.

The coaches need to understand your assignment and your evaluation criteria in order to provide useful feedback to your students. It is much better for coaches to receive this information from you directly rather than to have the students interpret it for their coaches. At a minimum you should provide coaches with the following:
  • What is the purpose of the assignment?
  • Who is the intended audience?
  • What length do you expect? Will presenters be penalized for exceeding a certain length?
  • Will the presenters answer questions? If so, are they expected to answer questions during the presentation, or will the audience be directed to hold questions until the end?
If you have specific preferences and expectations, you should include those, too. Consider the following:
  • If you have assigned a team presentation, do you expect every member to speak? Does every member need to speak for the same amount of time?
  • Do you want students to organize their presentations in a particular way or to emphasize certain aspects of the assignment more than others?
  • Do you have specific preferences about slide design or delivery style?
It is also helpful for coaches to be aware of any strengths or weaknesses you have observed in previous students’ oral presentations in response to the assignment (see example below).
Example 1 
Dear Coaches,
Based on the students’ product pitches in senior design last year, I suggest you keep an eye out for the following problems.
  1. Teams tend to organize their product pitch presentations around their discovery and decision-making processes rather than around pitching their designs. As a result, teams present too many design concepts in too much detail. For example, “Our vehicle needs a form of locomotion. We’ve considered A, B, and C” (followed by a series of slides that describes each form and its strengths and weaknesses). If you observe a team using this organizational approach, urge the team to mention the most important forms of locomotion they considered but to focus on justifying their final choice. In other words, they could say, “We considered tread and pulleys as forms of locomotion but selected 4-wheel drive because . . .” You may find that the teams are reluctant to cut all of the slides they created on the alternative design concepts because they want to show all of the work they’ve done. If that’s the case, suggest that the team hold those slides in reserve as back-up in case someone asks about one of the concepts they eliminated during the Q&A.
  2. No energy or enthusiasm.
  3. No motivation. No attempt to engage audience’s interest.
  4. Conclusion fails to emphasize benefits/advantages of design. Instead, a team ends with a weak statement like, “So I guess we’re just gonna build this airplane and take it to the competition to see how it does.”
  5. Weak transitions between speakers and slides.

Schedule coaches well in advance of oral presentation due dates.

Presentation coaches are in high demand at mid-semester and at the end of the semester, when most faculty assign oral presentations in their courses. Therefore, it is important to communicate with coaches early in the semester to ensure their commitment to your students at the time they are needed.
For your students to benefit from the feedback they receive from coaches, they should practice their talks at least three days before their in-class performances.

Urge coaches to communicate problems to you.

Coaches are in a position to observe problems students encounter in attempting to complete your assignment and to communicate the issues to you for quick resolution. For example, you may have asked students to prepare a presentation for an audience from another country, but they may not know how to make the appropriate adjustments in their style of argumentation, delivery, or approach to question handling to accommodate an audience from another culture.
Coaches can also convey students’ sense of confusion if, for example, they are getting different sets of instructions from faculty members who are team-teaching a course.
Establish a dialogue with the coaches that encourages frank conversations about the difficulties students are having. The conversations will surely lead to improved student presentations.

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