Tutoring and Demonstrating - Presenting Seminars

Students Presenting Seminar Papers

This should be an ideal way of ensuring that students are active participants in discussion and share responsibility for the class. In practice, it can have a deadening effect. Most students are nervous about such presentations and the response of some is to provide themselves with the security of a fully written paper, often crammed with facts to demonstrate that they have done a lot of work. These students will tend to put their heads down and read the paper at high speed to get through all the words in the allotted time. If they are interrupted at any point, they are thrown, so usually the group subsides into silence, to listen to a monologue.

It is important, however, to maintain this form in university classes, particularly at a senior level, when to give a presentation is to accept one's place as a mature, equal participant in intellectual discourse. The trick is to learn to manage this form so that it stimulates discussion rather than closes it off. The following suggestions should be helpful.

Suggestions for successful student presentations

• Enlist the students' help in setting the ground rules. You could start by asking them to list the characteristics of tutorial presentations that have worked well in their experience and those that have not. Put this on a whiteboard and use it as the basis for your rule-setting.
• A strict time allocation is important. Determine what it will be and how it will be handled: will you allow questions along the way and, if so, how will this affect the time? (It may be better to allow your paper-givers, say, ten uninterrupted minutes, on the understanding that they will have to finish exactly on time.)
• Try to ensure that the paper is not read. This is particularly difficult if it has to be submitted in written form as well as presented to the class. A solution may be to discuss the essential differences between the two types of presentation and to ask your students to prepare a talk outline separately from the written paper.
• Give some time to teaching your students the principles of effective oral presentation - there are some ideas later in this guide. Students should not be expected to perform tasks for which they have not been given guidance.
• Ask your students to focus their papers on a certain number of questions that they want to direct to the class. They could finish their paper with these questions, leading straight into discussion, or the whole paper could be structured around them. A variation may be to invite them to set up the terms of a debate.
• If students are assessed on their presentation, you should make clear to them that an important criterion might be the extent to which they are able to stimulate discussion and involve the other students, and offer some guidance on how this can be achieved. You could also try to convince them that you will not be impressed by long, detailed chunks of factual information.
• Give students a model by yourself presenting a focused, provocative paper to start discussion in a tutorial early in the course.

Guiding group projects

Leading problem-solving sessions

Teaching in a laboratory or practical class

Problem-based learning

Clinical tutoring

Next chapter: Chapter 7: Assessment, feedback and support

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