Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, Ed.D. of Custom Professional Learning, LLC. I’m a speaker, educator, consultant, and yes, a program evaluator too!
In my first career as an educator, I dedicated years to co-teaching and coaching/mentoring teachers. I was intrigued by teachers who possessed a talent for engaging students. Was it their lively personalities, raw charisma, carefully crafted lesson plans, or the particular activities the students were doing that made the difference? I began observing closely and taking notes. As I transitioned from the classroom to the conference room creating and facilitating professional development courses for teachers and school leaders, the answer became clear: it’s all of the above!
Hot Tips
BE engaging!
Successful teachers, trainers, and presenters have a strong sense of how to be engaging–using their eyes, face, body, and voice to interact with audiences. Start by getting comfortable with good eye contact and movement, whether you’re on a stage, at the front of a room, or on a webcam and screen. A good speaker coach can teach you how to best use your voice and ensure your body language aligns with your messaging.
Use principles and purposes to select engagement strategies
I have a long list of interactive activities that can be used to engage audiences, but rather than just choose them at random, I use a set of principles and purposes to guide my practice.
My favorite principle is this: Think like a teacher. Your audience came to learn something from you, whether you’re teaching them a new skill or presenting results of an evaluation. Reflect on what they came to learn by asking yourself, “what do they need to walk out the door with, that they didn’t walk in with?” Your answer should be about the knowledge, understanding, or ability to do something that you want your audience or participants to walk away with.
Then, choose your audience engagement strategy based on purpose. One very common purpose is process and reflection. After sharing some content, your audience will need time and space to process what you’ve just told them and reflect on what it means to them. They need time to make connections to their own prior knowledge and figure out how this new information fits into their existing schemas. There are any number of strategies you can use to encourage your audience to process and reflect. Ask participants to:
- Pair up and discuss (aka “turn and talk”). You can pose a question or prompt to guide their conversation.
- Take a few minutes to journal on their own as they reflect on what they learned.
- Do something creative with their new understanding–draw a mind map, diagram, or picture that represents what they just learned and how they’re making sense of it. I’ve even had audiences create sculptures with pipe cleaners (aka chenille stems) or Play-Doh!
- Cool Trick: Use these strategies in combinations!
Incorporating principles and purposes into your teaching or presentations represents a strategic approach to audience engagement that can help you tailor engagement strategies to the specific needs of your audience, resulting in a more effective and enriching learning experience.
Rad Resources
- I write about using audience engagement principles and purposes on my blog, and wrote an Audience Engagement Strategies handbook for AEA’s Potent Presentations Initiative (p2i).
- Well-known sites with loads of engagement strategies:
- Liberating Structures
- National School Reform Faculty Protocols (designed for K-12 educators, but most are perfectly suitable for adults)
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.