[Louie Barnett]

@cory-schwartz what follows is very much a stream of consciousness!

Could you take this up a level to look at what impact you want students to have on their audience? For me, history is all about studying the past in order to gain insights on human behaviour, that can inform the present. So could we say something like “students will enable their audience to gain insights into human behaviour that they can relate to issues/challenges in the present”. Then perhaps the project is that students need to investigate a period of time or event interesting to them. They could be given the task of presenting this history, where they have to explain what they’ve learned about human behaviour as a result of their research and how this might be relevant for understanding the present. They could then give their audience (other students) a short survey where they ask something like: “what have you learned about human behaviour as a result of this presentation and why?” and “how can you apply what you’ve learned to a challenge/issue in the present day and why?”. Both you and the students can analyse the survey results to see whether they actually had any impact on the audience.

Then the “teaching” before this becomes about learning how to investigate a time period and how to communicate learning from this in an effective way. So you could have a rubric that focuses on the impact, and has some tips on how to have this impact e.g. speak clearly during your presentation etc. Then, feedback after a presentation becomes: 10/15 students in your audience could outline how they would apply their learning from your presentation to an issue in the present day. Something I think helped this is…Something that could have helped more is…[insert constructive feedback about comms skills, research skills etc].