Wait... is that a learned skill?! Student Share-outs

When a manager or colleague asks me to share out something I am working on, I am able to determine the following:

• What is important to the audience that I need to share
• What is important to me that I want to get across
• What information is helpful and what information is not

What I learned last year (and am re-learning this year) is that knowing this is a learned skill.  I asked students to share out their projects about telling a story with data.  It was amazing to see how many blank stares I was getting.

Students seem to be so used to having a rubric or pseduo-script for presentations that this idea of casually sharing out their learning was not something most students were able to do. 

Ultimately I gave them this (below) guide.  I stressed that this was just the three most important things I thought they should talk about, but it might be different for their project.  It was interesting to see which students stood at the front and answered each question out loud and which ones were able to pull out the big ideas themselves.  

Here is what students were given:

Your presentation should...

Tell us about your data:

• What data did you choose?
• Why did you choose it?
• What was difficult about finding, choosing, or working with your data?

Tell us about the process:

• What did you expect to find?
• What was your process to explore your data?  What different things did you try?  Did you filter your data, use a pivot table, try different visualizations, etc?

Tell the story:

• What story does your data tell?
• What questions does this raise for you?
• What other data would be helpful in telling your story or answering your questions?
• Why is this important/interesting to you?