As peer education advisors, peer educators, and health educators, we want to be asked by faculty to present on collegiate health and safety issues. Classroom presentations provide outreach to students, increase awareness of services available on campus, and are a great peer educator recruitment tool. These presentations can also be challenging. Fifty-minutes is not a lot of time to thoroughly cover many health issues.
Rachel Billowitz, MPH (Rachel.Billowitz@nau.edu), a health sciences lecturer at Northern Arizona University, suggests the following tips to increase the effectiveness of one-time presentations to classes. These were originally posted to the
HEDIR Listserv in regards to sexual health presentations and are reprinted here with permission.
1. If possible, try to ask the instructor for two class periods, so you are not trying to condense all the content into one.
2. Ask the students to do the reading prior to your presentation so they are familiar with the content.
3. Work with the class instructor to solicit anonymous questions from the students about the topics. Small squares of paper collected in an envelope work just fine. Obtain those questions before the presentation, and tailor your presentation to address the unique concerns of that student group.
4. Do not try to focus on delivering a large amount of factual information in the presentation. Instead, consider focusing your presentation on activities that ask the students to apply the knowledge gained from the reading to real-world scenarios to help facilitate skill building. For example, put students into groups of three and ask them to: brainstorm factors a heterosexual couple should consider when selecting a birth control method; brainstorm ways to negotiate condom use; brainstorm ways to give and get consent in a fun/ sexy way, etc.
5. Connect students with online resources that can link them to medically accurate sexual [or other] health information. Several sites have functions that allow people to ask questions anonymously and a health educator posts the answers within a day or two. An excellent site is the
Go Ask Alice site from Columbia.
Thank you to Rachel for these great tips. Do you have any additional tips for classroom presentations? Share your tips with others by posting them as a comment to this article.
General Assembly 2012 will be held November 1-4 in Orlando, Florida. Our conference hotel is The Doubletree Hotel at the Entrance to Universal.
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