Modules are assessed in a variety of ways at the University of Worcester. You can be assessed through individual essays, portfolios, exams or presentations. But, there are a lot of modules which assess through groups presentations.
Not everyone is a fan of group presentations, me included, as it can add extra stress to an already stressful timetable! You need to work with people you may not know, find time to meet up, organize who is doing what and make sure everyone contributes.
Despite there being negatives, there are many opportunities where group presentations work well! The past 2 weeks I have had to present 4 group presentations for my PGCE course. At first I thought this would be a nightmare, but it worked out perfectly! Here are some of the ways you can make sure group presentations go smoothly:
- Make sure you work with people that are reliable. Luckily for me, all of my groups were hard working and willing to put in the time and effort.
- Make sure that everyone knows what’s going on. With some presentations, it is obvious that people only know their part and don’t know what is going on with everyone else. It looks and sounds so much better if everyone knows a bit about everyone’s section.
- Have one person to make the presentation. It looks best if all slides have the same formatting and flow together. Nominate one person to put them together and then everyone else can contribute their information to the presentation. This works well with poster presentations too, it looks much better if everything is formatted the same.
- Hand out the jobs evenly. Often, one person may be left with everything and does all the work. Remember it’s a GROUP presentation and everyone should contribute equally.
- Make sure you have time to practice. It’s all well and good knowing your part off by heart, but it needs to be able to flow into the next speakers’ part. Practice makes perfect and it is much more professional when you’ve had a couple of tries.
Hopefully with these tips you can get through group presentations and see them as a positive exercise where you can share knowledge and expertise. They can be very useful to help share out the workload, just make sure it’s shared out fairly!
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