1. Make your power-point slides more exciting.
Here is a good 5 min video showing you how to make boring, conventional PowerPoint slides more engaging. The examples are impressive — you might need some Powerpoint whizzkid to help you do the clever stuff.
2. Tell your audience up-front the 3 or 4 key points you want them to take away from your talk.
Imagine you are a doctor presenting a talk Epilepsy and Pregnancy to women with epilepsy who may plan to get pregnant one day. Applying the “leading with your news” format, you might start your talk this way:
“I want you to take away these three key points from today’s talk. If you remember nothing else other than these three points, I’ll be delighted.”
1. Drug X, a commonly prescribed and very effective epilepsy drug, is dangerous for both the mother and the baby during pregnancy. The safest epilepsy drug for pregnant women is Drug Y.
2. A woman with epilepsy who follows the recommended medication guidelines can expect to have a normal pregnancy with just a very small elevated risk for complications compared with women who do not have epilepsy.
3. A woman with epilepsy who is planning to get pregnant should visit her doctorwho manages her epilepsy x months beforehand to set things up for a safe pregnancy.
Why should you give your punchline away upfront?
Two reasons:
- You’ll grab your audience’s attention. Your audience will never be more receptive than in the opening minute of your talk, so don’t waste that special attention on boring stuff! Instead, open with your key take-home points — just like newspapers do in the headline and opening paragraph of newspaper articles.
- Your audience won’t sit there for the first half of your lecture in a vacuum wondering where your talk is heading. They’ll know — because you told them! Once they know you key points, everything else you tell them will make a lot more sense.
3. Ask questions.
You can ask questions two ways:
- Ask a real question and pause for a moment for someone hopefully to answer it.
- Ask a rhetorical question, where you ask a question, pause a moment… and then answer it yourself!
What do you think happens it that pause between your asking the question and your audience or you answering it?
That’s right — your audience thinks about the question and tries to come up with an answer in their head. And that’s what you want — a thinking audience!
It goes against our nature to hear someone ask us a question and for us just to ignore it. That’s impolite! Once we’ve tried to come up with an answer, we are then curious to find out if we are correct — so we are all ears! Even if we couldn’t think of an answer, we’ve still put in enough thinking work to want to find out what the answer is. The result is that asking your audience a question means that you now have a room of very curious and attentive people waiting for an answer!
Back to our doctor giving a talk to epileptic women thinking about getting pregnant. Here are some obvious questions:
- Imagine you are on a high dose of your epilepsy drug and you’ve just discovered you’re pregnant. What fears might be going through your mind?
- Who can guess the three most serious dangers of an epileptic getting pregnant?
Or maybe you are giving a lecture on Ohm’s Law to first year engineering students. You might ask this question and then get your students to raise their hand to indicate their answer:
“What do you expect will happen to the peak of this action potential if I increase the external sodium concentration? How many of you vote that it will get bigger? How many vote for smaller? How many aren’t sure?”
Even in a class of hundreds of students this questioning methods works well in generating a feeling of suspense that is uncommon in standard lectures. Even the most tuned-out students will tune in for this moment!
4. Give out the PowerPoint slide info as lecture notes so your audience doesn’t have to write everything down.
Perhaps they need to write something down, though, to get them involved, so try this idea:
For each PowerPoint slide in the handout, leave out the key bit of information for them to write down themselves off the PowerPoint slide you show them.
5. Don’t describe — show a short video
YouTube is a great source of “showing” examples of topics you might want to teach your students; it is also a great source of talented, passionate lecturers presenting their topics in effective ways.
Here, for example, is an excellent short Youtube of a guy explaining Ohm’s law in such a clear and interesting way
Alternatively, you could give all the relevant, good YouTube links to your students and tell them to watch them afterwards.
6. Don’t describe – show a demonstration
If you’re teaching Ohm’s Law, give your students a real Ohm’s Law problem to solve. Here’s another video where a guy has just bought something from Radio Shack and the instructions on the packet say he has to produce a 2.6 amp current — and the video shows how, by applying Ohm’s Law, he can do that.
7. Don’t just say what it is — use an analogy to say what it’s like.
That first Ohms Law video used a clever analogy that likens voltage to the difference in height between two containers of water.
8. Get your audience listening for answers — and writing them down
Give your students a list of questions and then show a YouTube that contains all the answers to those questions. Get your students to write the answers down as they listen. They will be active listeners who are listening with a purpose.
9. Break up your lecture with quick quizzes at the end of each section.
At the end of each section of your lecture say: “Right, quick quiz to see if you were listening.”
Then volley off as many quick yes/no questions you can ask in 60 seconds and get students to answer by rasing their hand if the answer is yes. It’s fun, it helps them consolidate what they’ve learned, and you get feedback on whether your message is getting through. And, just as important, these quick quizzes break up the monotonous lecture format and get your students involved and thinking.
10. Get your students to write a one-minute paper on the key points they learned from the lecture.
At the end of your lecture, you ask your students to write down as many key points they can think of in one minute. They then hand in these answers. This exercise does two things:
- It helps your students consolidate what they learned during your lecture.
- It provides vital feedback for you on how well you got your key points across. If you notice some of your key points consistently get missed, that tells you that next time you need to present those key points better.
11. At end of your lecture, give a couple of exam-type questions based on the lecture.
This is another way to help your students recall what they’ve just heard. Tell them questions like these may appear in their exam and they’ll take a keen interest in answering the questions!
