Presentation Preparation

Poets write words the way composers write music. We use rests, repetition, crescendos and decrescendos. The Ross Gay poem I linked above is proof of this. Take a listen and notice where he goes quiet. Pay attention to how he speeds up and slows down. Where does he pause completely?

The fact is this: Your audience only kind of wants to listen to you. In any given moment, they have hundreds of other thoughts and worries plodding through their minds. Use your voice to signal to them when to really pay attention and what to remember. The sentences you rush through will be forgotten. Speaking slowly and deliberately, on the other hand, will signal to your listeners to take note.

New presenters will almost certainly speak two times faster than they intend to. So, as I’m telling you to vary your speed and volume, let me also say that you first need to monitor your baseline. If you’re already talking at the speed of one hundred words per minute, then you have no business doing anything other than slowing down. 

Whether I’m presenting SchoolCEO content or reading a poem, as soon as I walk on stage, I force myself to take one deep breath before I even open my mouth. Start slow and then add in variance for impact.

When I’m alone in my house practicing how I’ll read a poem, not only do I practice what to do with my voice, I practice what to do with my eyes. If there’s a line in the poem of particular significance, I’ll decide before I even walk into the venue that as I say that line, I’ll hold eye contact with someone in the audience. Nothing says “pay attention” quite like a stare down.

Why, you might ask, do I need to know in advance when I’ll be looking out at the audience? Because even though I’m “reading” a poem, those are the lines I have to memorize fully and unequivocally. Ask yourself: Which statistic in your presentation do you think has the most impact? Which question holds the most weight? What do you really need your audience to remember when they walk out of the room? Those are the parts of your presentation to memorize so that you can look out at the audience and hold their gaze, one person at a time, as you speak. 

Even if the venue doesn’t have a podium or desk to put your notes on, printing them in advance is definitely still a best practice. No one likes to watch someone up on stage furiously scrolling through their phone muttering about forgetting the exact figure. We will, however, offer a kind of respectful tolerance for someone ruffling through papers to locate a statistic.

Printing your notes is also a mental trick to free you from the binding tether you undeniably have to your computer. Presenting can be daunting, and our technology is like a safety blanket. What tends to happen, though, when we bind ourselves to our computers is we fail to utilize the whole room and our whole bodies.

Let’s go back one more time to that Ross Gay video linked above. Do you see where he straightens his spine? Where he waves his hands? It looks and feels natural, doesn’t it? And still, I would bet that he does those exact movements every single time he reads that poem. He knows before he even starts reading where he might wave his hands or throw back his head. He makes good use of his physical space—and you can too. But first you have to disentangle yourself from your laptop.

Let’s say I’m the third poet in a reading line-up. The first two poets share pieces that are heavy and move slowly. I notice the audience isn’t engaged, maybe even shifting in their seats or pulling out their phones. Instead of reading the dense, five-page piece I’d planned to share, I opt instead to read a series of short, pop-culture pieces that I brought as back up. Why? Because I’m watching the audience, and I can tell which pieces they’ll prefer. 

As a school leader, you won’t be able to suddenly change your presentation topic if you find the audience isn’t reacting positively. What you can do is make slight adjustments as you go. Are they laughing at your jokes? Lean into that. Are they staring at you silently when you ask open-ended questions? Maybe ask for hand raises instead. As an educator, you know this well: Monitor and adjust.

And while making real-time adjustments is crucial, that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do beforehand to prepare. If your speech doesn’t contain sensitive or private information, try feeding it to ChatGPT and then asking it to cosplay as different audience members. Use prompts like: “If you were a dissatisfied parent, what questions would you have for me after listening to this talk?”

This last pointer doesn’t come from my experience as a poet. It comes exclusively from my time as SchoolCEO’s Senior Writer. Early in 2025, I had the absolute pleasure of working with Dr. Julie Sweetland. Sweetland is a sociolinguist and a senior advisor at the FrameWorks Institute, a nonprofit think tank, and she wrote an article for SchoolCEO’s Common Ground issue about how to handle stories that just aren’t true. 

We don’t have to tell you that especially in today’s day and age, any time you take the stage, there is the risk of a hyper-polarized audience sending even the best presentation off the rails. Maybe they introduce misinformation during the Q&A. Maybe when it comes time for public comments, they get to the mic and try to filibuster. Managing contentious discourse and turbulent environments is part of what Sweetland addresses in her piece.

We encourage you to read her full article, but just in case all you have time for is a quick excerpt, here’s one of our favorite parts:

Correcting misinformation with hard facts is ineffective because simply rebutting an argument is not the same as reframing it. Instead, follow these steps to correct misinformation strategically:

1. Explain what is true. Give people a way to understand how the issue works in reality.

2. Normalize and humanize. Provide examples that offer an alternative to what moral entrepreneurs are painting as “deviance.”

3. Warn against the fallacy. Characterize the manufactured ideas as false and harmful.

4. Unmask the disinformation tactic. Name the ways false ideas are being presented (cherry picking data, mischaracterizing, etc.) and explain their effects.

And, when possible, proactively preempt the spread of misinformation or hateful speech in public forums. Take, for example, school board meetings—which are often hotbeds for contentious discourse. 

Before the meeting even begins, consider taking the following preventative measures: 

• Prepare the chair and facilitator for hot-button issues, especially those that are currently taking place in your school, district or community. 

• Consider assigning different staff members to roles like addressing misinformation, monitoring social media and assisting with sign-in—where they can watch for known bad actors. 

• Prepare and practice statements to respond to hate speech.

During the meeting itself: 

• Communicate your district’s emphasis on respect, inclusivity and anti-bias principles. 

• Set time limits for public comments. 

• Share speaking guidelines in advance. For example, when hate speech is expressed, you can respond by taking the opportunity to reiterate your district’s values. Call out hate speech in the moment by saying something like, “Comments like that are deeply problematic and inconsistent with our values and mission.” 

Excerpt taken from Dr. Julie Sweetland’s article “The Stories That Just Aren’t True,” originally published in the Spring 2025 issue of SchoolCEO Magazine.

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