Provide an overview of presentation teaching, and explain its appropriate use.

• Presentations, explanations, and lectures by teachers comprise a large portion of classroom time primarily because curricula in schools have been structured around bodies of information that students are expected to learn.
• The instructional goals of the presentation model are mainly to help students acquire, assimilate, and retain information.
• The general flow or syntax for a presentation lesson consists of four main phases: presenting objectives and establishing set, presenting an advance organizer, presenting the learning materials, and using processes to monitor student understanding and to help extend and strengthen student thinking.
• Successful presentations require a fairly tightly structured learning environment that allows a teacher to effectively present and explain new information and allows the students to see and hear.

Describe the theoretical foundations of the presentation model, and summarize research that supports its use.

• The presentation teaching model draws its rationale from three streams of contemporary thought: concepts about the way knowledge is structured, ideas about how to help students acquire meaningful verbal learning, and concepts from the cognitive sciences that help explain how information is acquired, processed, and retained.
• Bodies of knowledge have logical structures from which key concepts and ideas are drawn for teacher presentations.
• Knowledge can be broken into four main categories: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge. Factual knowledge is knowing about something or knowledge that something is the case. Procedural knowledge is knowing how to do something. Conceptual knowledge is knowing the relationships among basic elements. Metacognitive knowledge is awareness of one's own knowledge and thinking processes and knowing when to use particular knowledge.
• People take in information and knowledge through their senses and transform it into short-term and long-term memory. Meaningful verbal learning occurs when teachers present major unifying ideas in ways that connect these ideas to students' prior knowledge.
• The empirical support for the presentation model is well developed. Studies have shown the positive effects of using advance organizers, connecting new information to students' prior knowledge, and presenting the information with clarity, enthusiasm, economy, and power.

Explain how to plan and use the presentation teaching model, including how to design advance organizers and present effectively.

• The planning tasks for the presentation model include carefully selecting content, creating advance organizers, and matching both to students' prior knowledge.
• Presenting information to students requires preparing students to learn from presentation as well as delivering learning materials.
• Clarity of a presentation depends on both the teacher's delivery and the teacher's general mastery of the subject matter being presented.
• Advance organizers serve as intellectual scaffolding on which new knowledge is built.
• Specific techniques used in presenting new material include explaining links, rule-example-rule, and verbal transitions.
• Teachers can help students extend and strengthen their thinking about new materials through discussion, questioning, and dialogue.

Describe how to implement a learning environment conducive to presentation teaching.

• In a presentation lesson, a teacher structures the learning environment fairly tightly and makes sure students are attending to the lesson.
• Most important, presentation lessons require clear rules that govern student talk; procedures to ensure a brisk, smooth pace; and effective methods for dealing with student off-task behavior or misbehavior.

Describe the appropriate ways to assess student learning consistent with the goals of presentation teaching.

• Because the primary goal of most presentations is knowledge acquisition, it is important to assess major ideas at various levels of knowledge. If testing is limited to the recall of specific facts or information, that is what students will learn. If teachers require higher-level cognitive processing on their tests, students will also learn to do that.
• Goals of presentation teaching lend themselves to being assessed with selected-response test items.