Practicing presentation skills

Students have been on the receiving end of presentations, good and bad ones, for a long time during their years of schooling. My students, in the field of International Business and Languages (IBL), give plenty of presentations, but it never hurts to do a more specific course. As presentation practice in their first or second week of class, I asked them to give the worst possible presentation.

Considering they're business students, I chose two real, but funky, products for them to try and sell to the audience. They could choose to talk about Eat Fit Cutlery, which is a set of a spoon, fork and knife that has a dumbbell attached to it so that you burn calories while you eat. The second option was Pizza Beer, a pizza-flavored beer made by boiling a pizza Margarita and using that water for the beer. Obviously, the second option was the most popular one.

Students, in groups of three, enthusiastically set about their task of thinking of ways to make all the presentation mistakes known to man. After about ten minutes of preparation, each group had to do their sales pitch. One student pretended to be so nervous he couldn't speak; another intentionally spoke heavily-accented English with Dutch words mixed in. They received phone calls during their presentations, fiddled with their hair, lost track of their story, aggressively went to members in the audience to push them to buy, used curse words, spoke in a low voice, moved back and forth from one leg to the other, pointed out the bad qualities of the product, giggled incessantly, and read their lines from a piece of paper. In other words, they very badly indeed!

After all the presentations we elected a "winner" and did a quick evaluation of the various mistakes we had seen. These students know all too well how not to give a presentation, so let's hope they remember to avoid all those issues when they have to do their good ones.