Welcome to the first in a series of six articles, for the one teaching how to pitch. In the following weeks, you can read about how you teach the students to control their nervosity, how to engage the audience, how to handle critical feedback, how to get ready for pitching in front of strangers and how you can help their good ideas to live on after pitching in the classroom.
But first and foremost, here you can read an article on what matters when training how to pitch, and what you as a teacher especially needs to keep in focus.
Short and sharp
When you pitch, the purpose is to hand on knowledge in an appropriate way. Whether it is the case of a final exam, or having an idea that should be carried out and shown to people of the real world. Too many times it happens, that good work is wasted, if you don’t present your project properly.
Thus, pitching is a discipline, that consists of two parts. Content and form. Talking of content, the pitch shouldn’t be a widespread experience, take too long, because it derails your audience. Instead, you keep the listeners interested by telling them about your project in short and sharp terms. You erase all the unnecessary fillings to not exhaust your subject, making room for clarifying questions, turning the situation into a fruitful dialogue. That’s where Pitcherific’s online pitch training tool comes in. It helps your students master the content of their pitches and gives them an online pitch training ground where they can practice their verbal delivery in a safe environment. Your students can get a taste of how it works here. We can also help you and your class get all set up if you need it. Read more about that here
Teaching stage performance
The good content of the pitch, however, is almost destroyed if you don’t understand how to perform on stage. It doesn’t matter to just go up there and just read line by line what you wrote down or be so nervous that you end up disappearing into the wall behind you. We have all seen students that have brought in the PowerPoint slideshow for backup and just stand there with their back to the class reading out loud from the slides. That won’t do. Especially not if you want to prepare your students for the pitching-reality outside the comfort of the classroom.
Up through the school years, when making a presentation, focus seems to have been more on the content than the performance itself. The content is still very important, being the reason for standing up and saying something in the first place. But without doing it interestingly in a way that engages the audience, many wouldn’t bother to use their time on you. That’s why it makes good sense, for you as a teacher, who want’s to help your students get better at pitching, to have a greater focus on the form and how to deliver that message in practice. Naturally, you still keep an eye on WHAT the students are saying, but we’re adding you teaching them HOW to say it, into the mix. In this way, the students learn how to extract and convey knowledge from a long process to a precise, understandable format; a generally important skill for both exams and the future life in a workplace.
Read more on the blog and look out for new articles in the next couple of weeks, written especially for you.
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