Why Presentation Skills Aren't Taught

Presentation Series—Part I

In the Information Age, everyone is involved in information design.

I have asked thousands of Boston University students over the last decade three questions:

1. Have you ever been required to give a presentation?
2. Were you told what form it would take?
3. Did you get any explicit instruction in presentation design or delivery?

Overwhelmingly, responses from these students are

1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. No.

These American undergraduate and graduate students as well as international (ESL) students studying in the U.S. express some frustration with being given a heady task (1), having the tool to accomplish this task prescribed (2), yet given no meaningful instruction (3). At most, they receive some kind of evaluation rubric in advance.

Something fundamental to our lives today is missing from this common scenario: any mention of much less attention to the considerable skills required to design information for presentation and deliver it—which are, by the way, very different skill sets. Why is it that in the world of commerce salespeople receive extensive training in message formulation and pitch, while in education, the need goes unmet if not unacknowledged?

I think there are three primary reasons for this omission:

1. Time. There isn't time in the course schedule to devote to presentation design.
2. Assumptions. Older teachers who never received such training are inclined to think that young students are technology savants.
3. Training. Few teachers in any discipline have formal exposure to principles of instructional design.

Time. Student presentations consume a lot of class time—instruction time that students pay for. The technical and logistical overhead of presentations inevitably result in even more time devoted to student presentations than scheduled, which results in reduced instruction time. Furthermore, in large classes, students must present in groups to reduce the number of presentations, which requires more time, though generally outside of class, for coordination, planning, and preparation.

With this scheduling commitment for presentation delivery alone, few teachers may feel they have the luxury of burdening the schedule further, except in the most cursory or superficial manner, with instruction in presentation design and delivery.

Assumptions. Teachers who did not have computers as a part of their educational experience, as students, tend to see students who grew up with computers as "comfortable" with technology. This comfort, however, does not necessarily impart competency or conceptual understanding. That is, the mechanics of building slides in slideware is a simple skill and one independent of understanding the logic or effectiveness of a particular design. Any sampling of slideshow presentations created by college faculty or students would demonstrate this idea, what with the abundance of gimmicks (animations, transitions, sound effects, clip art) and arbitrary bullet point fragmentation of data masquerading as analysis, all at the expense of thoughtful design and presentation of data in a manner that suits the data first. Such tools in the hands of the uninitiated, not surprisingly, guarantee the triumph of form over content. In an analogy to languages, we might observe that a person with facility in several languages may not necessarily have anything intelligent to say in any one.

Training. Why is it that in the Information Age so few people have any exposure to formal information design? Teachers, or anyone involved in providing instruction, design their information package. Again, to draw on an analogy, academics in higher education who spend their lives teaching often have scant explicit training in the art of teaching—an absence painfully felt by countless uninspired undergraduates. In higher education, one's demonstrated subject knowledge, measured by academic degrees and publications, forms the basis of one's qualifications to teach—at least in the eyes of hiring committees. The closest thing to a teaching apprenticeship, serving as a graduate assistant or teaching fellow in a doctoral program, is more OJT than structured training.



All of this suggests that sometimes skills critical to performance are assumed rather than verified because recognizing a need, addressing it, and following up with higher expectations takes time and resources. Presentations would be a much more effective learning task and a more efficient model for information delivery with some attention paid to information design, suggestions for which I'll address next.


Related links:

Intelligent Use of PowerPoint
Tips for Using PowerPoint for Academic Presentations

PowerPoint Is Evil: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely (Edward Tufte, Wired Magazine)

Edward Tufte interviewed on NPR (Weekend Edition Sunday, 8/20/06)

Constructivist Educational Theory

Using Presentation Software to Enhance Language Learning (Internet TESL Journal)