Via elearnspace, a spot-on article by the Provost of The King’s College in New York City, Peter Wood, in MercatorNet. Money quote:

Generally schools of education recruit weak students. The average SAT scores for would-be teachers for decades have scraped along among the lowest of all enrolled college students. The schools of education then proceed to endow these well-meaning but dull folks with strangely mistaken ideas about how children learn. The wisdom on how to teach accumulated over several thousand years of civilisation is summarily set aside in favour of what some recent educational theorists have conjectured. The conjectures are typically backed by a form of social science “research” several notches less rigorous than the reader surveys in supermarket magazines.

Wood believes that we’re moving away from the current model and “we will move to a system in which a degree in education will mark a potential teacher as under-educated and mis-trained. Instead teachers will be recruited from the ranks of the liberally educated and will learn, as good teachers have always learned, by devotion to the task itself.”

Certainly “devotion to the task itself” is a great way to learn, but I think it may be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Individual teachers shouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel - they should be able to learn from what other have thought and have done. It would be better to embed teachers in a lifelong self-directed learning process, based on mentoring, collaboration and action research. The web application we’re working on has a simple (but kinda neat) action research functionality, one that I hope will help teachers connect theory and concept to empirical performance, and then share that experience.

Thought #1
Of all the valuable messages from Marjora Carter’s TED presentation on her urban “green development” project (discussed here), my favorite line is this one:

I do not expect individuals, corporations, or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral…I know it’s the bottom line or one’s perception of it that motivates people in the end. I’m interested in what I like to call the triple bottom line that sustainable development can produce, developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government, and the community.

Tom Friedman (author of The World is Flat, which is required reading for BE professionals) said the same thing on a Sunday talkshow last week, that Green means global competitive advantage, and it’s in our best economic interest to get serious and innovative about the environment.

Thought #2
Via Arts and Letters Daily, “The collapse of the Doha Round is a matter of evil and idiocy, a case of outrageous incompetence, so bad that it verges on criminality” …as another example of unadulterated hypocrisy by the US and EU governments, this one can’t be beat.

From the inimitable Guy Kawasaki, an analysis of an amazingly powerful presentation. The speaker is Marjora Carter, and is short enough that it’s easy to use in class as a model. Together with the 15 tactics that Guy riffs on, this is some super sweet learning content for more advanced learners.

Most of our business English clients are presenting from the typical corporate 120-slide .ppt deck, and don’t have the flexibility to use many of these techniques the same way that Ms Carter does - the company culture and audience expectations are very different. But with some careful modification, many of these tools can add impact to even the most “choreagraphed-from-HQ” presentation templates. And you could make the argument that the constraints inherent in pre-organized decks are actually liberating - the only way to kick the audience in the butt is to use these types of rhetorical tools.

It’s great to watch the speaker get into her rhythm - she’s quite nervous at the start and reading off her notes, but once she hits stride - watch out. Despite her nerves, she is so real as she presents - so absolutely present - that the sustained standing ovation she recieves is hardly surprising. This connection with the audience should encourage our lower level students to worry less about grammatical accuracy and nerves and more about connecting with the audience as a fellow human in a way that transcends language skill.

Now, the extent that you can help students do that in a presentation about supply chain logistics will depend on the Ss’ passion for the topic and ability to connect it to the big picture. And while that may depend on the company’s mission, unless your student works for, say, big tobacco, everything that improves execution helps deliver value to people, which after all is what it’s all about.

Last year I had a great “helped-the-client-kick-butt” moment with a presentation on, yes, supply chain logistics. She was an ALTE B.1 or so and worked for a pharmaceutical lab. We had a 60-slide deck to work with, and so we focused on the intro and conclusion as the best places for her individuality to stand out. We scripted her introduction to connect with her passion and commitment to her job, and we did it in 20 seconds and without intruding on the deck (her audience was upper management for logistics from HQ and wouldn’t have approved of any deviation). We used three off-deck slides, photos with no text, presented Lessig-style for only 3 seconds each as she spoke. Here’s what we wrote for her intro - slide underlined and speech in italics (name changed):

Title slide

Good morning everyone. My name’s Maria Fernandez and I’m the logistics coordinator here in Venezuela. First off I’d like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to show you the work we’re doing in this challenging economic and regulatory environment.

Before we move to the deck, I’d also like to say one thing. Like everyone is this room, I’m passionate about the details of getting our raw material from Ireland to our plant. But sometimes my focus on these details hides the true reason behind our job, and I want to share with you what I do when that happens…

Black slide

Pause…when I lose sight of the reason we’re doing this I just remind myself that every minute we save, and every dollar we squeeze out of the process, are precious resources that we can send here

Photo of company research headquarters

…so that we can discover and manufacture these…

Photo of company’s breakthrough drug

…so we can save the life of her.

Photo of 2-year-old child in hospital

Pause…so let’s get started and see how we can best do this.

First slide of deck

We pulled the photos off the company website so they were somewhat familiar to the audience, and the little girl was of course a real patient and real case. It took about twenty seconds and it framed the rest of her presentation in way that “made meaning” and connected her with her audience in a way that her peers didn’t - she recieved a tremendous amount of praise for what could have been just another of the 8 presentations that day. It doesn’t always work out this well for our students, but when it does, it’s great.

Here’s a nice post on eliminating fillers (the “uh”’s and “um”’s) from your Ss’ presentations. Mother Tongue Annoyances is a new blog for me and looks like it might be interesting, and although personally I get bored with the grammar police, there seems to be a lot of content here that’ll be useful for our clients. Via Visual Being. (BTW Visual Being did you ever retract/correct your silly attack on Kathy Sierra?)

Via Guy Kawasaki, here’s a cool resource for presentations skills that looks like it has some useful clips on different examples and presentation styles.