In so many ways, teaching is reminiscent of being a platoon leader.
In both cases, you’re it. You’re the one standing in front of the formation. Roughly 40 to 50 souls, of varying levels of motivation and ability, are looking to you for guidance, direction, and instruction. Working within the general set of parameters set by whoever holds the position one level above yours, you will plan, task, and execute. You will build close bonds with those immediately around you (whether that’s TAs and facilitators, or NCOs) and the students or joes who form your ranks. Either position comes with stress — and intrinsic rewards — that are proportional to the level of “I care” that you apply to the role.
When things click? You have the awesome opportunity and amazing power to hugely shape and influence people’s lives.
One of the major differences between the two positions, though, is that you might only get to be a platoon leader once. Time doesn’t freeze. Lieutenants have a funny habit of becoming Captains, who lose their platoons to move on up, and who in turn walk to to the dark side after about five years to join the field grade ranks. They might look back with some “coulda woulda shouldas” when reflecting on their company-grade time, but there’s no way they can act on those thoughts — that fleeting time is gone.
For University Lecturers, it doesn’t really work like that. Yes, our title might change slightly, with a “Senior” or even a “Master” tacked on the front, but we keep doing the tactical thing, semester in and semester out. And in many ways, that’s awesome. Because just like Phil gets better and better with choosing his words for Rita in Groundhog Day, we get to do the whole thing, from scratch, over and over. The students’ baseline stays more or less constant, and everyone gets two blank slates each year, but along the way we pick up little tidbits that fill up our bag of tricks. These are the little things we learn to include in the syllabus, to add onto (or take out of!) an assignment prompt, or to say when a student tells us “I finished it before the deadline, really, but I just forgot to hit ‘Submit’ in Blackboard.”
One of the best items in my bag of tricks is placing a strict time limit on student project presentations.
I wish I could say I conceived this as part of some elaborate grand scheme, but this came about for me by accident. In my very first semester of teaching E-Commerce at BU (Fall 2014), we had an end-of-semester team project that involved a written submission and a group presentation in the last class meeting. I might have mentioned some timing guidance, but if I did, I didn’t emphasize it enough, and I certainly didn’t enforce it.
With 48 students in the class, and teams made up of 4-6 students each, I didn’t have the foresight to “gong” any of my teams that went upwards of the 30-minute mark. By the time 9:00 rolled around (the classes then were officially scheduled to run from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.), there were still several groups who hadn’t presented yet. I dismissed the rest of the groups, and I told the others that they could either stay and finish then, or leave and re-schedule with me for another time. Thankfully, all the remaining teams stuck around (I didn’t think I could force them to stay past the official end time, as that sounded like some sort of Geneva Conventions violation…but if they volunteered, I figured it was okay).
I left campus that night somewhere between 11 and midnight, and barely made the last train out of North Station. Not only did I have some ‘splainin to do when I got home a little after 1 a.m. (no, really — student presentations!), but I was exhausted the next morning for work. I vowed not to let this happen again, mostly for practical reasons (had this been a morning or afternoon class, we might’ve been bumped from the room at the official end, and for an evening class, it made for an absurd end time).
From then on, I started to enforce a strict 15-minute time limit for presentations. With the passing semesters, I got more and more serious about this. I emphasized it heavily in the rubric and the prompt. I put several reminders on the class slides in Blackboard. I took my iPhone out at the start of each one, starting the timer as soon as the teams made their introductions, and with the volume all the way up so that the whole room would know when someone had gone into “OT.”
Taking these actions solved the practical problem mentioned above. More importantly, though, it has had quite a few spillover benefits. I’ll enumerate a few of those here:
- It shows me who really prepared. Taking an entire project’s worth of material, and condensing it into a 15-minute time constraint, is not easy. It sounds easy, until you start going through your slides, and realizing just how quickly that time fills up. A time constraint forces students to think critically — what *should* be presented, and which details can simply be saved for the written report? After a couple of semesters, I noticed a clear pattern that has held for years since: teams who get the timing right tend to get the other things right, too. Believe it or not, despite the heavily repeated emphasis on this exact point, I still get about one team per semester who just STEAMROLLS past the time limit, going up to 25 or 30 minutes. When that happens, it always comes back to unpreparedness — the only way to nail the timing is to practice. And knowing this feeds into the next ancillary benefit:
- It gives me an objective grading criterion. I use a pretty narrow grading range (I could write volumes about that topic, but I’ll save it for another time), but even still, it can be tough to split hairs when assessing subjective things, like presentation quality. A time constraint is pretty darn objective. In fact, what could be clearer? If the general guidance was loose, but the most specific, objective thing stated was “Don’t exceed 15 minutes”? Well then at least on that one thing, there’s zero ambiguity. You either did it, or you didn’t. If your entire team sat through all the classes where it came up, and no one stopped to think, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t go 25 minutes on this thing,” then you collectively dropped the ball. Almost without fail, that extra airtime was more about filler and fluff than about gold nuggets, anyway. As noted above, meeting the time constraint challenge is such an uncanny proxy for overall quality. I get reminded of this at the end of every semester, but it still amazes me when I stop to consider how correlated these two things tend to be with student presentations (especially because I don’t think it’s 100% intuitive, especially at first — it seems reasonable to think that *worse* teams might just want to wrap things up sooner…though it almost NEVER actually happens that way).
- It puts everyone on the same standard. Without some sort of limit in place, students might feel that it’s unfair that another group got more “mic time” to deliver their results. Holding everyone to one challenging standard is consistent with an overall spirit of fairness.
- It’s phenomenally good ‘real world’ preparation. In the world of business? (or, for that matter, very high levels of other sectors, like government agencies and non-profits?) Time is money. Bosses’ schedules are packed VERY tight during the workday. If you are asked to deliver a 10-minute update to the CEO on the status of such-and-such product? I hope you don’t plan to just walk in, unprepared, and just dazzle everyone with your glibness, without any respect for the boss’s time. If the CEO starts walking out of your 5:30 meeting at 5:40, while you’re still prattling on? It might not be the case that she’s being rude to you — it might have more to do with the fact that there’s another thing on the schedule, and not moving along would mean that someone else would have to wait.
Just to pile on a little bit further, I’ll add here that the teams that really get this right never even sound rushed, or feel rushed, during the presentation. They hit the main points, they stay high-level, and their pacing is a steady trot — never a frantic gallop.
I should formally state here that I don’t pretend to any grandiose claim of uniqueness with this. I’m sure that many others have found the same thing, and that at least someone reading this has reacted with “Time limits on presenters? What’s coming next — a treatise to declare that water is wet?!” I’m simply here to reach into my bag of tricks, show off one the shiniest items, and expound upon its benefits.
Whether you’re an adjunct, a full-timer, a secondary school teacher, a Toastmaster, a corporate trainer, or a military briefing instructor, I hereby offer you this: The next time you’re assessing your students’ or trainees’ presentations, enforce a strict time limit, and stand by for the magic that unfolds.
GoodWaveData 