The following insights have been provided by experienced RW instructors. Please send additional insights to mail@rw360.org.
Include stories to illustrate real life applications. Effective story telling is a key tool RW instructors can learn to deploy.
Less can be more. Our DRW 2.0 course is packed with great insight and information. Rather than trying to provide equal coverage to all lessons, consider which lessons and learning points are most important to your audience. Then, edit PowerPoint slides and focus stories and comments that emphasize these points.
Create opportunities to teach in smaller settings, which allow for more personal conversation and discussion. In smaller settings, there is time to ask for student responses to questions, such as, “What do you hope to get out of today?”
Be sure to connect the dots from one lesson to the next, showing how the entire course fits together.
The video clips provide a great place to draw attention to how people really respond. Ask open-ended questions that leave space for students to insert their personal thoughts, e.g., “How did you see that?”
When doing a custom presentation for a special group, go to Google or YouTube to find video clips related to that group. For example, when doing training for a moving company, you could use some of these clips to inject a little humor into the session.
Role plays can provide wonderful opportunities to contextualize the material, both at home and when teaching internationally. Be sure to create role plays that reflect the culture in which you are teaching, by working with local hosts to construct realistic scenarios that reflect how people actually engage one another in that culture.
Invite questions by providing small slips of paper to every student, which can be placed on the podium during breaks and then answered during the next session. Mention the slips during your opening, saying you will answer as many questions as possible (but not all of them, especially if they are confusing or provocative). To prime the pump, have a list of common questions in your notebook that you can draw from.
Use breaks to live out what you have been teaching. It is easy to get caught up in “to-do’s,” in the few minutes available, thus short-changing students who have questions or comments. When there is a conflict between something you have to get done and a student’s desire to talk, arrange a time to speak in greater depth later, e.g., ask them to send you and e-mail that includes days and times when they are available for a follow-up phone call or a skype conversation.
Find a creative way to “hook” the audience early in your presentation. A quote from a famous person such as Abraham Lincoln, a provocative headline, a video clip, an intriguing question, whatever helps your students make the transition from where they are at that moment into the materials you are about to present.
Suggestions from 2019 Instructor’s Retreat:
- Start with “why” (the reason you do what you do) not “how.” If your why does not move you emotionally it will not move others
- Test audio visual setup long before your presentation
- Stay fresh by continuing to read and study in the field (Today’s newspaper …)
- Provide professional quality resources that make an immediate positive impression and make it easy for people to follow your presentation
- Keep text on PowerPoint slides to a minimum … ideally 14 characters
- Grab attention with surprising statistics
- Display appropriate emotions
- Develop concise, common, and compelling personal stories (Five C’s of a good story: character, conflict, cure, change, carryout message)
- Share short, humorous examples of your own deficiencies that others will relate to (e.g., Left Hand Turns, When Your Enemy Is Freezing), and never tell demeaning jokes about others
- Tell compelling stories about people and life in general that others will connect with (e.g., Hooked)
- Allow your audience to experience something before you teach it (thumb exercise)
- Allow frequent, short opportunities for discussion and application
- Use video clips that trigger emotion (and tell people how long a clip is)
- Hook people at the beginning of a section with a partial story
- Trigger alertness by saying “watch for …”
- Trigger specific action steps
- Develop a compelling conclusion
Record and watch your presentation and ask for feedback (survey)
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