Make Your Speech a Journey of Active Discovery

By breaking your  teaching points down into questions and discussions that lead to your point, you can help the audience go on a journey of active discovery, instead of passive listening. The question-answer approach naturally builds in points for the audience to absorb and process your ideas. Your audience will be more engaged and, as a result, retain more information. They'll also have more fun along the way. And so will you.

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Make Sure Your Panel Discussion Includes Some DISCUSSION

When running a panel discussion, it's usually a good idea to have some DISCUSSION. If you are a moderator, you need to constantly be looking for ways to keep the audience interested. Try to listen to your speakers with the ears of an uninitiated audience member: What context does the audience need? What about the topic is most interesting to the audience?

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Call-outs

Instead of thinking of your adult audience members in your presentation as “students”, you should think of them as “participants”. Instead of thinking of yourself as a “teacher”, think of yourself as a “facilitator”. Your job is to draw out your participants' expertise and interest by establishing an environment that invites their ideas, opinions, and experiences.

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Playing Your Speech to Scale

Playing to scale simply means making sure that the size of your physical and vocal expression matches the size of your room. In larger rooms, you have to make sure that the back rows are getting a life-size version of your speech. To do that, you're going to have to be a bit bigger than life-size.

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Keeping On Point

A speaker begins a presentation. He doesn't do a great job on the introduction, so you don't get his name, but whutevs. This meeting is supposed to be about new timekeeping rules, right? Now, there's a slide of a dog on the screen. Now he's telling some story about his grandfather in the Army. What was the topic? What are we doing here? 

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