This book sets out to consider whether the focus of medical education should be the content of education, the medical educator, or the learner. The process of presentation is taken as central to medical education and therefore the authors set out to help educators improve in this area.
There are five chapters. The book is clearly signposted, to the point and very practical. Each chapter concludes with multiple-choice questions to check what you have learnt and proposes a way to assess your own performance in the areas covered. I was less keen on the scoring method, but some may find that a helpful way of charting their progress, especially if they have set themselves some educational goals in this area. A feature I liked was the ‘Bioboxes’, which provide a brief biography of the key players, as they add some context to where the person's ideas came from. The book consistently tried to give evidence and justify the suggestions made, and linked them either to some theoretical underpinning principles or to research.
The first chapter provides guidance on how to prepare slides, especially for complex information, and includes a short section on workshops. The next chapter is an overview of using audience psychology to plan presentations. In some ways this may have been a useful opening chapter as it raises key issues about learners and the different ways in which people learn. Chapter three is about how to deliver a lecture effectively, with some good tips, and chapter four discusses measuring outcomes and ensuring success. I found this a less helpful chapter. There was a focus on learning as acquiring and mastering information. Medical education, especially in psychiatry, includes attitudinal and reflective learning, and related outcome evaluations were not touched upon.
The final chapter focuses on how to supplement teaching to better support learning through a range of different methods and mechanisms. The authors provide a worked example of their own programme in psychopharmacology. The principles are easily transferable and the suggestion about how to keep track of students’ progress was particularly helpful.
The foreword of the book promises: ‘this book not only describes how to become a powerful public speaker but also provides a living example of best practices in medical education’. That is one of my two gripes with this book. Medical (and indeed any type of) education is so much more than powerful public speaking. No presentation, however brilliant, is going to make up for a lack of other teaching skills. The focus on presentations over other teaching techniques and knowledge as the key outcome of learning are perhaps misleading, as the authors do acknowledge that lectures and presentations are only part of the repertoire. The second issue is minor and somewhat pedantic. It relates to the brief section on addressing cultural diversity within potential audiences. I found the suggestions to address this superficial.
Without a doubt, this book provides excellent support in how to deliver great presentations and for that I would recommend it.
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