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Handouts To Support Your NASP Presentation and the On-Campus
Presentation |
Presentation: There are lots of
different interpretations of what a NASP-paper-presentation handout should
look like. Not are all exactly like the format I’m promoting here.
However, if you follow the path I’m suggesting you’re unlikely to go too far
wrong. The requirements for the on-campus presentation are
intended to mirror the requirements for the NASP presentation; thus, the
comments below are intended for both settings and purposes.
Some salient pointers:
It is never sufficient or
appropriate simply to duplicate PowerPoint thumbnail versions of your
overheads and presume that they will serve as an adequate ‘handout’ for a
Convention presentation ―
whether on-campus or at NASP. This might do for an established
presenter giving a Mini-Session Workshop; however, for your on-campus and NASP
presentation the handout you provide should look like an excerpted 'paper.' Handouts for this style of presentation
need to provide much more information than simply a summary of the content
of your talk. Rather, they should reference your topic within a wider
context and provide a permanent record of the domain of knowledge that
you're presenting.
If you have prepared a pretty complete
handout that provides many of the answers to the
sticky/contentious/complex questions that could be asked by a testy audience
member, then it’s really easy to deflect a hostile or over-probing
question (or even someone who’s trying to ‘grandstand’ at your expense) by
stopping them in their tracks and saying that you’ve addressed their “very
interesting question in the handout” and may be able to get back to that
topic later in the presentation – but "in the meantime," you tell them,
you “want to draw their attention to the handout and move on with the
presentation content you've planned for the entire group.”
The second point is that a NASP-type
handout is NOT just a reiteration of the pointers you actually provide in
the spoken presentation. This scenario is clearly different from the
situation where you're presenting an in-service or to a KSU class. By
contrast with any session you might teach, the NASP presentation must be a
stand-alone ‘teachable moment.’ Consequently, you need to find a way
to address some of the information to which you want to make reference
(perhaps some ‘taken for granted’ introductory facts, for example) without
having verbally to explain each of them in your brief allotted time.
The best way of providing this information is within the handout — in that
way it has been incorporated into your presentation but hasn’t taken any
time from your central role which is to provide some specific information
about just one element of a whole, complex topic.
- The handout, then, contains:
- The background to the topic about which
you’re to speak. The presumption is that you’re only going to be
speaking about a slice of a much larger pie. So the handout begins
by placing your ‘subtopic’ into the larger context of theory & practice.
- The handout also can reference a bunch of
BASIC LEVEL information which you don’t want to have to plod through
tediously; so you put it all into the handout (perhaps as bulleted
statements) and then you can reference a questioner who asks about this
precursor information directly to your handout. For example, you
might include a Glossary so as to avoid having to 'teach' the technical vocabulary
of your session.
- Of course, the handout also provides an
actual summary of what you actually plan to say at the meeting.
- An additional section containing Tables
and Supplementary Data is typical for research-based papers. These would
be data points which are central to a COMPLETE interpretation of your
data — but which you don’t actually plan to display in a slide or
overhead or even to explicitly mention to your audience.
- Practice-based presentations often have a
section of the handout which provides a case-study, or a series of
examples of how the intervention might be implemented, or samples of some
curriculum materials, etc. All this, too, is information that only
gets mentioned in your actual talk by way of a reference. That is, you
draw listeners' attention to its existence but don’t do more than
outline that it's there for them to refer to when they want to see how
the intervention has been attempted in your particular work setting. This is also the
information that you could 'stretch' to explain if you found yourself
with a 10-minute segment at the end of the allotted time that you didn't
fully anticipate.
- Annotated Bibliographies are useful, too;
for they let the reader know the ‘level’ (i.e., introduction ―» expert) of the
books or articles you’re recommending, as well as some specific content
(4 or 5 ‘biblio’ items is generally sufficient).
- References to the texts/articles/www-pages that you actually cite are also essential elements of a handout.
References must be exact — you may have the author in the
audience! If References are inexact, just as if your spelling is replete
with error, the not-too-hidden message is less than fully complimentary!
Thus, a handout for NASP typically covers a
deal more information than that which you plan to display in the
meeting. The rest is backup in case the discussion takes a turn in
that direction, and also is a context into which you’re fitting your
comments. This longer version is also the paper format that is
appropriate for the ERIC submission after the meeting (details
available). Take up the ERIC service offer of lodging your paper
with their repository. It becomes a 'publication' and serves as a
location to direct folks to in the future when someone asks. If
you've followed my meanderings on how to create an acceptable paper then
it's only a few hours extra work to get a publication-credit for your
effort. And,
you’ll then have a
publication in addition to the NASP presentation for your resume. ERIC
are fast at making acceptance decisions and so action now would likely
make a difference to the resume you’ll soon be preparing for job-the
hunting season.
Print your handout out as single space and
duplicate on both sides. This makes for a lighter load to carry. Make sure that the first page has a footer
indicating that this is a paper “Presented at the 2009 NASP Convention,
Boston, by ..." etc.
It should have contact information for you (e-mail address is sufficient) and should reference
your affiliation as your internship school district. Don’t include the ‘intern’ appellation
— that’s not relevant for this purpose.
Again, be very careful to make sure that you’ve properly attributed all material
that you’ve taken from another’s work – the original author might be in
the audience! This is especially the case if you’re using Figure
material. It’s unnecessary to put a © logo on your paper.
Ask a trusted – but critical
professional friend to look over your work for error, ambiguity, confusion
or lack of clarity. Try to select someone with a natural facility in
language. It’s better to excise error at this stage than
apologize for it later (and is always better than having to squirm with embarrassment when someone chides you
for a misspelling).
Always ... Read carefully the
instructions NASP provides you about getting ready for the audience.
Their suggestions are based on eons of experience, even if they do seem as
if they're written for folks far less-experienced than you. And, never,
never, never fail to visit the room in which you're scheduled for
presentation at least a full day ahead. Check out the sound level
you'll need to manage with a full audience, look at the AV equipment to be
certain that you'll be able to handle it, note the lighting levels you'll
need to support your AV, check for the existence of a platform/podium if
that's what you're reliant on, check on the sight-lines and similar
features of the room that support (or distract from) your planned
professional presentation. Attend a
session there; it always helps to have watched another presenter in that
same presentation-space. When the room empties, stand in the space you'll occupy as a
presenter. Check out the ambient noise level and check out the
decibel-level you'll need to achieve to be heard. Clean the board of
messages that could draw away attendees attention.
When all this is done ... Treat the meeting
as a fun conversation with colleagues. Your hard work will have paid off.
You're now are acknowledged expert! CONGRATULATIONS |
