Practically Online: Redesigning Student-Led Presentations for Online Environments

Kristi Girdharry

The Practicum in Peer Consulting and Writing [1] is a tutor-training course for sophomores and juniors at Babson College. It is rigorous and challenging as students learn just as much about themselves as writers as they do about the process of tutoring. When we moved online halfway through the semester, in addition to our regularly scheduled reading, writing, and tutoring sessions, we had 14 presentations we had to modify that fell into three categories called Great Writing, Grammar and Punctuation, and Role-Play. The following article reflects on how I modified each presentation; although crafted for the Practicum course, these assignments and modifications serve as examples for others to think through when refashioning presentations.

Great Writing Presentations (GW)

The GW presentation is a low-stakes assignment that has proven to be both useful and enjoyable. Framed as a chance to contribute unique visions to our community understanding of the elements of great writing, the in-class presentation involves one student selecting a piece of writing they like that is about five minutes in length, bringing in copies for the students to read, and facilitating a discussion on it.

While reading and discussion are central to tutoring writing, the GW presentations offer much more: students think on their feet by reading and digesting information quickly, and they look at both content and style when discussing the details and larger meaning of each text. In person, this exercise worked beautifully as a “warm-up” to class—we settled in by starting with reading, which led to very active discussions. When we moved online, I thought it might be a little awkward for a student to try to mimic the in-person facilitation of this activity via WebEx, so I revised this assignment to take place on the Discussion Board.

Our first online discussion included excerpts from Walking Each Other Home: Conversations on Loving and Dying by Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush. Bush, narrating, is simultaneously helping Dass record his thoughts because he is nearly immobile and slow to speak due to a stroke. As one of our in-person, go-to questions became, “So what do you think?” I simulated this on the Discussion Board with the following instructions: To start off, and to mimic our in-class GWs, please start by posting your first impression of the piece by the end of class time on Tuesday. After you make your initial post, you will be able to see your classmates' posts as well. [The student presenter] will be moderating the discussion—responding, asking follow-up questions, etc.—but you can feel free to jump in to "talk to" each other as well. Keep in mind that you should complete at least one meaningful response by class time on Thursday.

I thought that the Discussion Board worked very well—given the heavy subject matter, I think the extra time to digest and respond thoughtfully opened students up to actual discussion, which can be tough to mimic online—so the following week we followed a similar pattern with another student’s selection from Howard Norman’s memoir I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place. Once again, students engaged in a seemingly organic discussion that made me proud as a teacher; however, when we met that week, it was clear that the students missed the spontaneous discussion of each other’s’ GW selections.

Because the Practicum consisted of only 14 students, we could feasibly all participate. In another course, I might use the Discussion Board format acknowledging the fact that reading and responding to such posts takes a lot of time, so this would either need to be accounted for by taking out other activities for the week or creating multiple discussion board threads for smaller groups of students. In the same vein as this, I would also consider breaking a class into smaller discussion groups for video conferencing, and then it would be my duty to synthesize those discussions for the whole class.
 

Grammar and Punctuation Presentations (GP)

Although the goal of tutoring writing is different from being an editor, our Peer Writing Consultants often feel much more confident when they have solid knowledge of grammar principles. For this reason, each Practicum student teaches the class a concept in grammar/punctuation. The parameters for GPs are that students must use at least two sources to learn about the concept (for example, the required writing handbook and a website); that they should teach the concept in their own manner, using their own examples; and that they should prepare an in-class exercise to ensure that their classmates demonstrate understanding of the concept. These presentations took about twenty minutes each.

While the major goal for these presentations was to inform the class, the preparation taught students how to look up these kinds of issues and how to teach them to other people. This also gave us opportunities to discuss style vs. correctness and the power and politics of language and education. Moreover, drawing from the presentation and activity, student presenters created handouts that could be used in the Writing Center. 

Once again, I had re-imagined this activity as taking place asynchronously, but I quickly learned from the GWs that there was room for both asynchronous and synchronous activity. As most of our student presenters had used slide presentations to teach their lessons, we mimicked this online through the use of the platform Brainshark, which is a subscription-based software that allows you to add voiceovers to your slides, which can be done through other (free) means. For homework, students watched the presentation and completed the exercise, which often took place through freely available survey software. During our class time, the student presenter talked about how the class did on the activity/assessment, and we spent time going over anything that challenged the class, which is where I could step in for clarity or come up with additional activities to help the class understand the concepts.

I could imagine a format like this working in another course where there are concepts or readings in which students are responsible for leading the class. The interactive slide presentation is a great way for students to take ownership of their learning and to break up instructor-created content. The presentation itself could be the basis of a class discussion or Discussion Board thread, or there could be other online activities (e.g. games like Kahoot or quizzes) to reinforce concepts. Some considerations I might make based on course level, type of assignment, and such is having groups of students collaborate on one presentation and modifying presentations lengths (in my experience, having three 5-minute presentations works better than having one 15-minute presentation).
 

Role-Play Presentations (RP)

What felt like the most ambitious presentation to put online ended up being the most straightforward from inception to execution. Working in pairs, students are given a reading on a particular tutoring situation and have to come up with a role-play that would lead into a full-class discussion. This meant that pairs of students had to read and discuss a text, conceptualize a scenario, develop a script, act it out in front of their peers, and develop appropriate discussion questions and/or anticipate what the students would be most drawn to from the presentation. Including discussion, these presentations often lasted 30-45 minutes. 

Again, while RPs teach the whole class a great deal about tutoring, it also enacts the principles of tutoring itself. Students had to set agendas, discuss texts, come up with solutions, and collaborate for a successful presentation. Watching these mock tutorial sessions, which often performed exaggerated examples like being authority vs. being a guide or tutoring in emotionally-charged situations, led students to make connections to their own experiences of being tutored themselves, tutoring others, and other areas of their academic lives. 

I knew that this activity would necessitate a mix of asynchronous and synchronous work as role playing with someone over the internet can be awkward enough without an audience. Similar to our in-person presentations, groups independently developed their presentations (scripts and recordings plus any pre- or post-role-play notes for classmates). They recorded their RP and uploaded for classmates to view. Students viewed the scheduled presentation in advance of our whole-class meeting, and the presenters led discussions on the lessons, questions, or concerns of the RP.

Pre-recording RPs proved quite fruitful because students could watch in advance of class, there is the opportunity to go back and look at specific instances. For other courses, I would note how much time RPs take and make sure that is within the scope of your assigned workload. Moreover, I would consider whether the role-play is being assigned more for course content or more for deep learning. While I could imagine assigning quick role-plays as jumping off points, the Practicum RPs took a lot of time and effort and necessitated a reflective component—in this case, it was an essay that asked students to address how the readings helped them prepare the scripts, how they worked together, what their goal was and how successful they were in achieving it.  

Presentations are a long-standing pedagogical tradition for multiple reasons, but the digital can present additional challenges: what happens when technology lags or fails? How do we support students in engaging audiences in digital landscapes? Recognizing that there is not a one-size-fits-all approach and thinking about the ways we can use the tools we have can help alleviate challenges and give students the best learning experience possible under the given circumstances.  

Notes

[1] When I took a new job as a Writing Center Director during fall 2019, I was fortunate to have a built-in mentor in former director, Kerry Rourke. From my interview day the previous spring, through the summer, and into the academic year, Kerry was as hands-on or as hands-off as I needed her to be; however, when it came to the Practicum in Peer Consulting and Writing—the tutor-training course—Kerry had affably strong feelings. “Kristi, you can do whatever you want,” she said, “But, trust me: this class works.” I thank Kerry for giving me the opportunity to revise these assignments, which stem from multiple generations of Writing Center Directors at Babson College.