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Communicating with your community is an important aspect of getting and maintaining public trust and permission to do the things you want to do. Without consistent communication, parents may perceive "early outs" to be teachers wasting time and a personal hassle for them. Without consistent communication about progress and results, local boards of education may not be willing to provide time, dollars, or other resources to enable quality professional development practices.
The book, The Presenter's Fieldbook: A Practical Guide, by Bob Garmston leads to the following suggestions to remember when presenting to your board, parents and community: |
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To view, edit, and print PowerPoint files you will need Microsoft PowerPoint.
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- Speak with user-friendly terms. There are many "shortcuts" in speaking to others in education but the "Education-eese" and acronyms will quickly turn off an audience of non-educators if you don't teach vocabulary and explain what acronyms stand for. Provide a visual to reinforce the few acronyms you might be compelled to use.
- Remember your public are partners. Instead of telling and selling, engage the participants in meaningful work. For example, given charts that display student achievement data, ask participants to work in small groups and write the captions. Solicit ideas for improvement by engaging them in an affinity process. Whatever you do, don't get your participants in a passive mood and keep them there.
- Anticipate questions. Before a presentation, try out what you want to say with your mom, neighbor, and friend who isn't in education. What were there questions? Another way to get questions is to post a piece of chart paper and provide post-its to participants at the beginning of the session. Ask people to write their questions and post them at break time. Be sure to get back to these questions before adjourning.
- When engaging people in activities, be sure to provide clear directions. You don't want people feeling stupid and once that happens, you've lost some trust and enthusiasm. Make directions clear and explicit. If there are more than two steps in your directions, use a graphic.
- Start on time and end on time. This will demonstrate that you honor peoples' time.
- Early in the process, make sure everyone's voice is heard. This is most effectively done with a good opener (the definition of a good opener is that it breaks preoccupation with whatever was going on before the session started, facilitates networking with one another, and makes a training point. An opener that does not have a good training point is nothing more than an ice breaker and most adults don't care for ice-breakers. See "Due North" opener provided as an example.
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