The ability to work in teams remains one of the top skills that recruiters look for in new college graduates. This means that it should be important for professors to improve the teamwork experiences that students get in their classes. Often the final product is a paper, proposal, or portfolio, but many of these are accompanied by a team presentation that is sometimes delivered to constituents outside of the classroom. However, the hard work your students put into their team project can often be undone with insufficient preparation or a weak effort in the presentation. These problems can be exacerbated when the presentation is online.
In this article, we examine five of the biggest mistakes students make in their team presentations, and how to fix each so they don’t impact your students’ grades and team experiences.
Mistake #1: Failing to analyze the needs and experience of the audience.
It’s Public Speaking 101: analyze your audience. This step is essential regardless of whether the team is presenting in person or online. Consider some of these questions: Who is listening to the project presentation? Is it the class and the professor? Is the presentation recorded or are you presenting live over a platform like Zoom? Will an outside client for whom your team did the project be on the call or watching the presentation? Or will it be a mixed audience at a brown-bag presentation for the department? Knowing the audience well can help your students to understand the level of the content they will be able to provide, the jargon that they can use, and the questions and comments they will be able to anticipate. And, knowing whether it’s live or recorded and watched later will help your students to better plan their presentation slides.
Mistake #2: Putting the presentation into the hands of 1 or 2 team members.
A team project needs to require a team presentation. Everyone has to be involved throughout the process of planning and completing each phase of the project, including the final presentation. This is true regardless of whether your class meets synchronously or asynchronously. While most teams are made up of members with at least some fears surrounding public speaking (the most common fear, by some measures), everyone needs to take an active part in the presentation. This not only demonstrates to the professor and the class that everyone was involved, but it also demonstrates the expertise that each individual member brought to the topic. Allowing one or two team members to take over this important part of the project is allowing the other team members to abdicate their responsibility to the team. And it’s important to have all of the experts available for the question-and-answer session so that any questions from audience members can be addressed competently.
Mistake #3: Allowing each member to produce their own slides.
One of the biggest hallmarks of a team presentation is a demonstration that the project truly required collaboration, demonstrating that members worked together. Document sharing programs, such as Google Slides, can help members to create a collaborative and cohesive team presentation. This is because team members can be working on the slides together, whether synchronously or asynchronously, creating slides that are consistent in their design and flow. We’ve all seen a set of slides that are designed by each member without an overarching theme. The fonts differ, the colors don’t work together, and the slides have overlapping content. When working online, each member can contribute the fact-based information that represents their work, and then one or two members can be responsible for creating consistency in the final look of the visual aids.
Mistake #4: Skipping online practice sessions with the entire team, whether in person or online.
Every presentation requires practice to ensure that the information and the delivery show preparation and a mastery of the content; this can be even more important in an online team presentation. Team members must be comfortable with the presentation platform, learn how to share the slides, verify that their slides display well, know their transitions across topics and speakers, and have a plan for handling the Q&A. We have held mandatory practice sessions for teams and found that students still had questions about the project. And we find that teams that miss these online practice sessions deliver much weaker presentations. Surprisingly, we have many students who are unfamiliar with how to use technology to effectively present and/or record their project content–and how to effectively transition between speakers and questions. These final online sessions will also help the team to tweak their slides and presentation content. We recently had a situation where a font color could hardly be seen by online participants, even though students said the font looked fine on their screens. Finally, recording these online practice sessions can help students actually see what they look like on the screen (and if that checkered shirt or pinstripe tie is just not going to work!) and allows them to practice what feels like an awkward habit of looking at the camera when speaking rather than at the faces on the screen.
Mistake #5: Failing to arrive “presentation-ready.”
Getting “presentation-ready” means that students must test their technology, presentation tools, and their entire process prior to the presentation. This way they’ll already know who is sharing the screen, who is controlling the slides, and how long the presentation will take. We’re ruthless about staying within the maximum time on presentations. This is because most of us are busy and many students, faculty members, and outside clients can’t stay online or present in the classroom beyond the meeting time. If for example, the first two teams go over even 2 or 3 minutes, this may mean that the last presentation may unfairly be cut short.
Team members who arrive late for the presentation, or the worst-case scenario – fail to show up altogether – cause considerable anxiety for teammates, especially when the presentation is being recorded to send to a client. The team needs to agree on a plan for “presentation day” that includes how early they will arrive or get online to do a final check, and how to dress for the presentation. Good team presentations coordinate, at least to some extent, attire and backgrounds. Most team presentations expect professional dress as a courtesy to the audience, and this is even more important when there is a client who will be present or watching the recording. We’ve even had teams agree on a plan for their attire, such as black pants, plain white shirt, and black tie.
Helping your students avoid the five mistakes that can derail a team presentation can go far in helping them to deliver a better product that demonstrates their understanding of the content. It will also showcase their ability to excel at some of the important skills, like teamwork, that employers are often seeking among today’s graduates. Finally, a polished, professional team presentation – especially when recorded – will give your students material for an online portfolio and maybe even talking points to take to job interviews where they are often asked about their team experiences.
Lauren Vicker is Communications Professor Emeritus and Tim Franz is Professor of Psychology, both at St. John Fisher University. They are the authors of Making Team Projects Work, published by Taylor & Francis (2025).
