101 Ways to Make Training Active is a compendium of activities and strategies that trainers, presenters, and discussion leaders can use to improve audience engagement.
The author, Mel Silberman, is a professor emeritus of adult and organizational development at Temple University where he specializes in instructional design and team building.
This article is one of a series of public speaking book reviews from Six Minutes.
Body movement is an aspect of public speaking that often gets ignored. Unfortunately, this leads to two extreme behaviors that are equally bad:
True effectiveness lies in between these two extremes, with purposeful body movement that complements the speaker’s message, and adds authenticity to the overall delivery.
In this article, we reveal 7 benefits of body movement for speakers, review a series of negative body movements, and share 18 practical tips for purposeful movement that enhances your overall presentation.
If you’ve ever been in the audience when a talented speaker has given a presentation, you know what a pleasure it can be. A skilled speaker can keep an audience’s attention for long periods of time. They can educate, inform, and motivate without making people feel as if they are at the receiving end of a lecture.
There are many techniques speakers learn to accomplish this. Sometimes, however, a presentation is made stronger by what you do not say. By avoiding these toxic phrases, you can be more effective in your presentations.
In previous articles in this series, we learned how to plan and how to lead group discussions. In this article, we dig deeper into effectively managing different personalities that you will encounter as a discussion leader.
In an ideal world, everyone in your discussion group would actively participate, support the opinions of others, be respectful, and be a positive influence in all ways and at all times. The discussion would proceed swiftly and successfully towards achieving the objectives. Sadly, I have yet to lead a discussion group in such an ideal world.
In the real world, discussions can go awry in a thousand different ways. Often, the largest obstacles you will face come in the form of participants who exhibit traits of challenging personas. They may be doing so accidentally or they may be doing so deliberately; either way, you are responsible for managing these behaviors.
Let’s start with three truths about feedback:
These truths present a few conundrums:
In this article, we define useful feedback, describe how and where to collect it, and discuss how to adopt a mindset which embraces honest feedback.
The first article in this series explained how to plan a group discussion.
In this article, we describe best practices when leading a group discussion.
There’s much more involved than simply getting people in a room, waving a magic wand, and declaring “Discuss now!” Your role as a discussion leader is complex and requires great mental dexterity and tact. How can you keep the discussion steadily flowing in a productive way at the right pace towards achieving your objectives?
Discussion groups come in numerous forms, including:
Discussion groups also range widely in terms of:
Despite this diversity, all successful group discussions share one trait: a competent discussion leader. Leading a discussion is an essential skill for a well-rounded speaker.
In this article, we focus on how to plan a great group discussion.
Your eye contact impacts your ability to connect with your audience and, by extension, your effectiveness as a speaker. In this article, we offer simple strategies for producing more eye contact and better eye contact.
When I was in high school, every teacher used an overhead projector regularly. Many years later, I can’t recall the last time I saw one used as meeting rooms are increasing equipped with digital projectors to display PowerPoint and Keynote slides. This is a clear technology upgrade, and I don’t miss the overhead projector at all.
Similarly, the flip chart is another device my teachers used often; sadly, it also gathers dust often in dark, neglected corners of meeting rooms. But flip charts are more than just relics; they remain one of the most versatile tools readily available to speakers.
In this article, we list the core benefits of using flip charts, and give several tips that will help you use this wonderful tool effectively.
Making eye contact with an audience is one of the most terrifying things about presenting a speech in public. Because it’s scary and difficult, several myths about eye contact exist to help us cope with our fears. These myths swirl around meeting rooms, conference halls, Toastmasters clubs, and classrooms, and if you listen closely, you might hear presenters whispering them to one another.
Unfortunately, none of these myths help a presenter’s delivery.
In this article, you will learn why these myths don’t work, and discover how you can move toward effective eye contact instead.
Full-day training courses offer many challenges for speakers, including:
If you can overcome these challenges, you can provide significant value for your audience.
This past week, I was fortunate to attend a series of full-day training courses (Usability Week 2012 in San Francisco, offered by the Nielsen Norman Group). While my focus was building my usability knowledge, it was also a great opportunity to learn from people who speak regularly around the world. One of these speakers was Marieke McCloskey, who taught my first session of the week.
This article offers 28 tips for designing and presenting training courses inspired by Marieke’s strengths and areas for improvement.
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