A small meme developed on Twitter yesterday prompted by the following tweet by David Wedamen, “Just had a GREAT idea from @brandeislibn. Conferences should be built around TEACHING not PRESENTING. Wouldn’t that be something?” (Thanks to Michael Stephens for retweeting and bringing to my attention.)
Alice Yucht built on the idea with her tweet, “how about Conferences should be about LEARNING, not Show-n-Tell ?”, which got me thinking about how we approach conferences, and conference presentations, in the library profession. If the goal of the conference is that attendees will learn, what do conference presentations have to look like to achieve that goal?
I believe the goal of presenting should be to a create a change in the listener; a change of behavior, thinking and/or feeling. Any good teacher or trainer will tell you that to be effective in creating that change, you must begin with the learning objective(s) in mind, and work backwards from there to design the lesson or the talk.
CONFERENCE PRESENTING: THE CART BEFORE HORSE?
Wedamen’s tweet points out an interesting feature of many library conferences—they seem to be designed around topics that presenters wish to present on, more than they are designed around, or focused on, the learning that participants need. In too many conference presentations speakers design their talks as core dumps of data, or long, dry recountings of “how we did it good”, without giving enough attention to the key question, “As a result of hearing me speak, people will do/think/feel_________ “(fill in the blank).
The answer to that question is the main organizing principle, the guiding star, of any well-constructed talk. Leaving out all of the other variables that go into an effective presentation (emotion, humor, pacing, eye contact, vocal variety, body language, visuals, questions, room environment, acoustics, etc.) it is very difficult to have a successful presentation if what constitutes success is a mere afterthought (or worse, if success is constituted by the fact that the speaker got a chance to speak at a conference…)
PUT THAT HORSE BACK! TEN THINGS YOU CAN DO TO EFFECTIVELY PROMOTE LEARNING WITH YOUR TALK
- Ask, “What do I want them to do, think, and/or feel as a result of hearing this program?” Ask and answer this question before you write one word or create one slide. The answer to this question is your OBJECTIVE. Let the objective guide you continually as you construct your presentation, throwing aside anything that does not help achieve the goal of the talk.
- Share your objectives with the audience at some point during your presentation–preferably during the first few minutes. If the audience knows what you intend to achieve with the talk it will give them context that will help them make meaning and ground the learning. It will also help them evaluate whether you have effectively achieved your goal. Or not.
- Have a strong opening. The first two minutes of your talk gives you a great opportunity to grab and hold the audience’s attention, but it’s likely that you already have their attention during the first two minutes. It’s the next 58 that present the challenge! So what do I mean by a strong opening? I mean an opening that engages the audience, creates some positive expectation for the rest of the talk, and/or provides a framework for the learning that is about to take place. Olivia Mitchell, who blogs over at Speaking and Presenting, suggests three possible openings – Organized Opening, Story Opening, Dramatic Opening — and discusses when/why to use each.
- Use examples to illustrate your points. For example… Don’t just say, “Merchandising your collection is good.” Say, “When we created a ‘recently returned’ display at the front door and displayed them all covers out, 98% of them recirculated within the same day and our circulation stats increased 20%.” Examples support the learning by attesting to the truth of your message, and also help ground the learning by clarifying and fleshing out your meaning.
- Use simple, clear, engaging visuals to reinforce your points (or don’t use them at all.) Good visuals can help you focus the audience’s attention, help them make meaning, and promote future recall, by connecting intellectual ideas with visual representations. As for bullet points… I’m not one of those people that believes bullet points should never be used, but if you use them, do it sparingly, with a large readable font, and a supporting image (if room permits.)
- Tell stories. Our brains are actually wired to enjoy stories. And because stories have the power to simultaneously engage the listener both cognitively AND emotionally, they are highly effective in getting your point across (assuming you know your point–see #1). And speaking of engaging the listener…
- Appeal to emotions as well as reason. Unless you are presenting on the planet Vulcan, your audience probably consists of human beings, and research shows that it is our emotions that lead us to act. If your goal is get listeners to DO SOMETHING, you need to rouse some feeling within them by appealing to their empathy, their self-interest, or some combination of both. As the Heath Brothers suggest in Made to Stick, you want to appeal, “not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.”
- Practice, Practice, Practice: There is no substitute for practicing your talk, preferably in front of others, to work out the kinks, identify and clarify muddied points, and become comfortable with the material. When you know your talk cold you will relax, let you personality show, and more easily connect with the audience. You may have noticed that it’s difficult to connect with a presenter who reads his talk in a monotone and seldom glances up from his notes. Conversely, it is very easy to tune out and start twittering during such a talk.
- Have a strong closing, and telegraph when it’s coming. You don’t have to bring tears to the audience’s eyes, or bring them to their feet. But you do need to let them know that you’re wrapping it up, and use the closing as an opportunity to reinforce your goal. You can do this by simply restating your main points and asserting why/how the listener will benefit by doing what you want them to do. Or you can end with a provocative question (engaging them cognitively), or with a story (engaging them emotionally). However you choose to close your presentation, use vocal variety and word choice to telegraph that your are concluding so the audience realizes that it is now appropriate to clap wildly.
- WHAT ARE YOUR IDEAS? I’m leaving #10 blank for suggestions. What do you do to effectively promote learning in your talks? What have speakers done that have helped you as a learner/listener?
Peter Bromberg sometimes talks, sometimes listens, sometimes learns, sometimes tweets, and sometimes blogs over at Library Garden.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruenenrw | CC BY-SA 2.0
Great post Peter — excellent advice and food for thought.
Here is my idea for the ten spot:
Build in time for questions and/or discussions when you are timing your talk: if you are giving a 90 minute presentation, plan to talk for 60 minutes and leave 30 minutes for interaction. Communicate with the audience about how you will handle questions. For instance: hold all questions until the end or please feel free to ask for clarification along the way or I will pause every 15 minutes for questions.
Also, do not be afraid to allow the audience to talk among themselves as an exercise at some point. Give them something specific to discuss or solve, ask them to turn to their neighbors and talk for 5 minutes and then choose a few audience members to report back to the larger group. This will work with 20 or 200. I have done it successfully and it really works.
Great post, Pete!
Amen to Janie’s suggestion to invite the audience talk amonst themselves.
I often ask the audience a question early on in a program and have them discuss it with a neighbor or two. It builds a nice “buzz” in the room and signals that this will be an interactive experience. It also reinforces that the participants have things to share with each others and the group, so the experience isn’t a one-way experience. I’ll do a quick de-brief with the group which can serve as a nice seque to talking about how to handle questions.
One of the biggest ah-ha moments for me as a trainer was learning that “whoever is doing the talking is doing the learning.” This is so true for adults!
Great post! My suggestion for #10 relates to #6 I think.
Whenever possible, co-present. There’s something about hearing two voices, about listening to two people talk to one another, that’s so much more engaging. I’ve seen George Needham/Joan Frye Williams do this at conferences and also have heard them do it online… and they do it very well.
I see a lot of conference sessions with multiple panelists, but usually one person speaks, then another, then another. Hearing them actually interact with one another about the topic would be so much more engaging.
Thank you for the excellent post, Peter.
I try to incorporate elements of active learning into my presentations.
Hi Kathy,
Great suggestion on having audience talk to each other for a minute or two early in the program. I’ve seen you do this (and tried it a few times thereafter) and can attest to how effective it is in building great energy in the room!
Brenda, ditto on your thoughts about the value of co-presenting which can be a real win-win: It’s Less exhausting and stressful for the presenter, more engaging for the audience. In my experience it takes a little more investment of time to plan and coordinate up front, but the payoff is huge.
Tom, can you say a little more about what you mean by active learning? Any specific examples you can share? TIA
Sure. Active learning is getting the audience involved and making them responsible for their own learning. I try to encourage this by having role-playing exercises–this works really well when teaching how to do reference interviews. Other techniques I like to use include handing out worksheets where they have to fill in terms or write things down instead of just giving them PPT slide printouts. I also like to pair people up and have them discuss and share what they’re learning. We also use active learning in our computer lab when we teach database instruction or other computer training.
Peter, I love this post. Would you and ALA Learning consider re-posting this to WJ as an article? We can provide a link back to the blog as well. LMK.
Oh, and, nice to see you at ALA MW too!
Spot on, as usual. Thanks for documenting what so many of us forget to do until someone like you comes along. As for #10: Lori Reed and I used a very simple technique for our ALA Learning presentation (“presentation skills”) last summer in Chicago, and the feedback was tremendously positive (one attendee wrote that she adapted it for her own ALA presentation a couple of days later): we arrived early enough to complete our set-up, then were able to greet and talk with individual attendees as they arrived so we had a good idea of what they were expecting. We then did random check-ins with a few of the learners during each of our two breaks so we could fine-tune what we were doing and make minor course adjustments.
The greeting ahead of time is so important! A huge benefit is that it makes you less nervous as a presenter. You’ve already established a rapport with the group.
Hooray for this post, Peter! Your comments are definitely not confined to library conference presentations. I was a conference spouse/barnacle last month at the Math Joint Meeting in San Francisco, and from what I could tell, some of their conference presentations seem to suffer from info-dump-syndrome as well.
It would be great to take some of the narcissism (is that too harsh a word?) out of presenting at conferences and make these sessions more about idea-sharing and conversation generation.
Loved the post, again.
Paul, thanks for your kind words and for adding your great suggestion to do a meet and greet, and feel out the crowd for their expectations, before the beginning of the presentation.
Veronica I saw your post over at at Freelance Librarian (I get ‘em emailed right to me!) and I guess it’s heartening in some ways to know that ALA is like many other big conferences (i.e. we’re no worse than average.) At the same time, as Michael Stephens recently pointed out in his ALATechsource post (http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2010/01/finding-my-tribe-at-educause.html), some conferences get it right. Very right. That’s what I’d like ALA to shoot for. I’d also point eyeballs to Elliot Masie’s Learning Conferences. Many of the programs are done as interviews (http://www.learning2010.com/L9-keynotes/learning-2009-keynote-videos.htm) and there is amazing post conference content available. Again, something to shoot for–the models are out there!
Great post Pete and the comments continued my learning. My number 10 is something I always like to do when I present. I explain early on that everything I use in my presentation from the ppt to my outline to the handouts to all of the links are available online so that people can really pay attention and not worry so much about trying to remember every detail or write it all down. I do this because I’m one of the types who will do just that if I don’t have resources to go to
All presentations are (hopefully) informational; the real issue is whether your immediate goal is to be merely instructional, as in ‘here’s how to do this, because you’ll need to do it,’ or inspirational, as in ‘here’s WHY you should want to do this, whether you need to or not.’ Whenever possible, I like to chat with attendees as they arrive and ask what they hope to learn here. That often gives me a sense of what the audience already knows, and how to focus my presentation to meet their needs.
Quote: “Structure your presentation around meaning and the big picture. Then support key ideas with details.”
From:
http://www.slideshare.net/garr/brain-rules-for-presenters (an amazing powerpoint, which itself is a great example of how to use graphics and narrative to great effect!)
Great post and I second the motion about conferences being places for people to learn not just to listen. I’d like to add don’t be afraid to get people up and moving around. There is way too much sitting at conferences. It gets blood flowing, oxygen to the brain and energy in the room.
Thanks Cheryl, great advice to get people moving, especially in light of the “beware your chair” research that was in the news a few weeks ago: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-while-you-read-this/.
I hadn’t read that blog post but it’s definitely relevant to me and my beliefs
Thanks for sharing. Now I’m going to get and find my ball to sit on.