20 Presentation Tips that Teachers Can Use

What do teachers and presenters have in common? They both try to keep their audience interested, engaged, and motivated from beginning to end.

What can teachers learn from great presenters?

The method of delivery. While teachers focus mainly on ‘what’, that is the content of the presentation, presenters pay special attention to ‘how’, that is the way they will deliver the content to their audience.

The following list contains some very practical presentation tips and strategies for delivering PowerPoint presentations. Teachers will find that most of these tips can be applied to normal classroom lessons.

Presentation Tips that Teachers Can Use

1. Tell your listener quite clearly: ‘Yes, this message is for you!’ Point out from time to time how your material is relevant to your listeners. The ‘you’ content should be high at the beginning of the presentation, when you deliver the most important points and whenever there is danger of losing contact with the audience.
2. Before you try to influence your audience, win their trust. Give them a piece of information they already have; suggest an opinion they already hold; express an emotion they already feel.
3. Don’t put up barriers by using fancy words or complex logic. Most audiences are immediately suspicious of smooth talkers with big vocabularies.
4. Establish strong eye contact early on. Don’t talk to the ‘audience’ in general. Address each sentence to specific people in the audience.
5. The projector should be used to stimulate the right brain, by showing pictures. Keep text to the absolute minimum; the less, the better. Which brings us to the next point:
6. Don’t read from the screen. Your audience have eyes and can read. If you need to show text on the screen, keep it very brief, in bullet-point format, and do the explaining orally.
7. When using presentations software, only use 2 different fonts in 2 different point sizes: 36 for headings and 28 for the rest. If you are using the 16:9 widescreen format, it is better to use 44 and 32 respectively. Don’t go crazy with italics, capitals and bold. Don’t use fancy borders which are more interesting than the words inside them. As for colour, high contrast is best — black or dark blue with white or yellow. Red is dramatic at close range, but less striking at a distance. Orange and green are blunt and difficult to see from a distance.
8. When you are ready to deliver your key message in a few well-chosen words, clear the podium for a minute — switch off the projector and clean the whiteboard. Let the audience concentrate on you personally.
9. Tell a story. Stories are captivating, fun, and highly memorable.

1. When we listen to a story we visualize scenes in our minds. It is called ‘The Theatre of the Mind’. Visualization is also fun.
2. Give names to your story characters to help your audience visualize and relate.
3. Always ask yourself: ‘Why am I doing it this way instead of writing a letter or making a phone call or sending an e-mail?’ The answer is human contact. So make it human. Allow your emotions to show. Speak from the heart and to the heart.
4. Don’t just give your ideas to the audience; set a puzzle for them, let them work on it, suggest you have an answer, let them ask for it. Dig a hole, push them in, offer to help them out.
5. Impose a strict structure on your argument. The 4 Ps: Position > Problem > Possibilities > Proposal.
6. Employ active, not passive constructions.
7. Use a three-part list (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité), alliteration (Form Follows Function) or both (Veni, Vidi, Vici).
8. Convert your key points into rhetorical questions.
9. Shift your register from formal to relaxed, from static to demonstrative, from cool academic to cosy intimate.
10. Be prepared to deliver facts and figures.
11. Be very well rehearsed and very well prepared. Keep in mind that when it comes to presentations, nothing ever goes as planned, so be ready to improvise!

If you have any additional presentation tips on how to make a successful presentation from a teacher’s point of view, feel free to post them in the comments.

Originally published at www.brightclassroomideas.com on August 16, 2017.