Effective presentations: how can we learn from the experts?

Abstract

Although the health care community expects its members to make effective presentations, presentation strategies are seldom explicitly taught.Those who do attempt to systematically teach or learn these skills soon realize that 'how to' guides for making effective presentations contain useful, but not sufficient, information. To become an effective presenter, it is necessary to understand not only the generic strategies that characterize effective presentations, but also the context-specific presentation strategies of a particular practice community.The framework for making effective presentations proposed in this paper is grounded in the knowledge of how experts acquire and use strategy knowledge, and takes into account not only the 'how to' of making presentations, but the circumstances and belief systems that determine effective presentation strategies in varying contexts.The framework is designed to make presentation strategy knowledge more transparent, and to permit presenters to learn from every presentation they give and attend.