Creating Dynamic Present-ipations (Part 1)

You’re at a conference. In yet another workshop enduring yet another death-by-PowerPoint presentation by a panelist who drones out the slides in a monotone, oblivious to the experience of her/his audience. 

After 30 minutes, you look around the room: 25% of the people are still listening, half are checking their Blackberries or Twittering, the rest are dozing. Needless to say, engagement and deep learning ain’t happening for most folks today.

Forty-five minutes, and 45 data-dump slides later, you are finally invited to respond – well, sort of! "So, if there aren’t any questions, let’s move on to our next presenter in the interests of time…”

Nooooooo!

It’s okay! Wake-up! It was just a bad dream. That would never happen…

Presentations are a staple of meetings, workshops and conferences, perhaps because they seem like an efficient means of “delivering” content.  But it puzzles me why we continue to rely on them so much when our personal experience and research suggests that they are not very effective at producing real learning.

Here are a few suggestions how you can share new information in ways that invoke different Learning Domains and Styles, and that design to put "participation" into your presentation to deepen their learning. I've broken this post into two parts: 

Part 1. Ways to Make Your Presentations More Interactive and Engaging -- If you can't "Lose the Podium", there are some ways in which you can at least "Loosen" it. 

Part 2. Skip the Presentation  -- Add via Dialogue -- If you have some flexibility with the format, consider not doing a presentation in favour of something more interactive. I'll address this in my next blog post another day. Stay tuned!

And to walk the talk, let’s make this a learning task in itself! As you read, note which ones you’ve tried before, which ideas you might try next time, and which other new ideas you could add to this list. Post your responses, reflections, objections and questions on this blog.

Part 1. Ways to Make your Presentations More Interactive and Engaging:

If you have to make a presentation, here are a few suggestions to make it more effective and interactive:

1. Keep it Short:  No more than 20 minutes since that is the outer extent of an average adult learner’s deep attention. In many cases, you can then use the other 20 minutes  for either a longer Q&A or a more creative learning task where the participants can process what you shared. 

2. Use a pairs exercise as a warm-up: : “Turn to your neighbour and share one strategy that you use to manage your “cholesterol”. We’ll hear a sample.” This will heighten their engagement from the get-go, and demonstrate respect for their opinions. It can also serve as a mini-LNRA to help you pitch your presentation at the right level. You can also weave their questions and examples into the rest of your presentation. 

3. Use PowerPoint to Enhance the Presentation, Not Drive It: Leave lots of white space, use intriguing visuals to convey and reinforce key concepts, provide a clear outline and visual key in the slides so people know “You Are Here”...(Please also see an article I wrote for GLP's Voices in Dialogue on Blending PowerPoint and Dialogue Education"). Better Yet! Dump the PowerPoint and use a Prezi instead! Prezi is a free, online tool to create dynamic, zooming presentations of words, graphics and symbols. (Click here to see some examples of Prezi's I’ve created). It’s much more fun and less linear than PowerPoint). 

4. Invite a few questions of clarification part way through the talk. Rather than waiting until the end. Better to address these types of questions sooner than later.

5. Weave in stories and anecdotes that speak to the Affective domain.  Next time you make or attend a presentation, watch the change in body language and engagement as the audience members hear a story or joke. I guarantee you that most folks will visibly perk-up and listen with heightened attention. (They’ll also tend to remember these better than the rest of your talk!).

6. Invite Questions From the Audience Before You Begin. You can do this verbally, or in written form.  This can serve as a mini-LNRA and help you adjust your presentation to the appropriate level of complexity.

For example, in a recent presentation on RBM that I did for the Canadian Teachers’ Federation, I began by asking them to write their questions about RBM on a post-it and place them on a continuum chart according to their familiarity with the topic (from “New to Me” to “Old Hat”). The type of questions they asked and the location where they posted them on the line gave me a quick read on their comfort level, experience, expertise and attitudes towards the topic. This really helped me adapt the rest of the talk and I referred to their questions during the presentation. 

7. Frame Your Presentation With an Open Question that suggests how the participants can listen more deeply.  For example: “As you listen and watch this presentation on Effective Communication, think about how you would explain this approach to your kids?” Debrief the question after the presentation to kick start the Q&A.

8. Provide the audience with a 1-page handout with a Text Box and/or Graphic that outlines the key content.  Ask the participants to listen to your presentation (Auditory), and read (Visual) through a text box, chart, etc. together and make notes on their questions, objections and suggestions on the page (Psychomotor). Be sure to let them know that you’ll invite them to share their answers afterwards. 

10.  Hand out Opinion Cards for the Audience to hold up as you speak. Red for Disagree, Green for Agree, Yellow for “Huh?” Nothing like seeing immediate feedback while you’re presenting. (Dare ya!)

11.  Invite them to respond via social media.  If you are feeling brave and everyone has access to the Internet, project your Twitter page on the screen and invite the audience to post their questions, and reactions as you go. Here's an example of someone who has done it recently. After all, if they’re Twittering anyhow, they might as well twitter about your talk, eh?  

What additional ideas, questions or suggestions do you have? Please post them on this blog. I'll respond in Part 2 and provide some additional suggestions on how you can Skip the Presentations and Add via Dialogue.

And don't forget that you can subscribe to this Blog via RSS feeds so that it comes into your inbox directly (see the sidebar). 

Comments

[Mark Wallace]

Dwayne,

Please keep getting this word out there! Learning and discovery together doesn't have to be boring. I had the privilege a few years ago of being part of a World Vision team that had banned PowerPoint presentations and used a wide variety of interactive learning methods from drama to mindmaps, building 3-D structures as means of learning and explaining. That team accomplished far more than any other I have worked with and had an awful lot of fun along the way. Unfortunately we were too participatory for a hierarchical organisation and it was "re-engineered" in a way akin to the Stepford Wives. Thankfully, many of us who were part of the team have moved on but continue to use what we learned with new teams and in new situations.

[stu]

D - bang on as usual. Have you come across Edward Tufte's critique of PowerPoint? http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp. Also have appreciated Presentation Zen http://www.presentationzen.com/. "In the interest of time..." is great. Obviously no-one else's interests are being served.

[Paul D. Nitz]

Dwayne,

Good advice. Most important, I think, is the 20 minute rule. According to the "Primacy-Recency Effect" we remember best what comes first in a presentation (Prime Time #1), second best what comes last (Prime Time #2) and we remember poorly what comes in the middle (Down time). In a 20 minute presentation, Down Time will be about 2 minutes. In a 40 minute = 10 minutes! In a horrificly long 80 minute presentation, Down Time is a whopping 30 minutes!!! Four segments of 20 minutes each will yield FAR FAR more Prime Time than an 80 min presentation, but we all knew that intuitively, didn't we? (Source: How the Brain Learns, D. Sousa).

In fact, with a meager 2 minute Down Time, as long as I can fit one cohesive chunk of info into a 20 minute segment, I'm not too concerned about being interactive with my presentation. To be devil's advocate, I'd even say presenting the information in an interactive way is low on my priority list of things I need to do to try to ensure learning takes place. Present your information in whatever efficient way you please. BUT follow it up with good learning tasks which ensure the immediate USE of that information.

Probably, this is more true when you are teaching in a classroom. Students know that they will need to be using this information. They expect it from the pattern of learning in past classes. In fact, now that I think of it, maybe an interactive presentation IS especially important when you have a group who IS NOT accustomed to a dialogic learning pattern. Thinking back to one seminar I did, the one hitch I had was probably due to the fact that I had a group who were so used to passively listening to an essay that they were taken aback when asked to DO something with what they heard. It would have really helped the participants if I had been more interactive in my presentation.

Ouch... this kind of smarts to realize my mistake. And, salt in the wound, it seems my advocacy for the devil is falling flat. I guess I'll just have to go Benedict on him. Might as well go the whole way and do what he hates: confess, be absolved, and change in the future.

Keep on writing, Dwayne... it's much appreciated.

[Dwayne Hodgson]

Paul, oh there you go again going all Benedict on someone. Sheesh.

Thanks for the Prime Time / Down Time calculations. A very useful way of explaining why longer presentations tend to be less effective. I've also noticed that people do tend to perk up when they hear "And in conclusion....". Maybe that would be a good way to start the Down Time section.....

Your point about students in a formal classroom maybe having different expectations is interesting. And I'm also wondering if there are differences cross-culturally that are at play here. In Tanzania, it was not unusual for professors or preachers to talk for hours. My Western colleagues would attribute that to it being more of an oral tradition, and the fact that visual and other props weren't available. But I do really wonder if people were able to absorb very much from such a long schpiel.

The other factor that comes into play here must also be people's own Learning Style. If you're primarily an Auditory learner, you can probably tolerate a longer presentation than someone who is more Visual or Kinaesthetic in their learning style.

But I'm still going to stick to my point that anything you can do to move a presentation along the continuum from monologue to dialogue will help to deepen the learner's engagement, learning, retention and transfer. But of course, the techniques that you choose must also be appropriate to your participants.

Mark & Stu, thanks for your encouragement and the links. I've added Presentation Zen to my Twitter feed. (Now there is a topic for another blog post, eh?).

Happy Sunday.