Thanks Dan! I think just writing my comment to you, articulating my scrambled brain, was helpful. And your reply was useful, and gave me some things to think about moving forward. Bring the audience along on my own thought process – as I’m thinking aloud, they’re thinking inside (if done well). You’re so kind to take the time to respond!

Big questions. Certainly, if you don’t think people learn from lecture then “testifying” here means you can’t lecture. (That isn’t one of my convictions, but I think I understand where it comes from.)

You highlight more than enough interludes in your comment to get your group through an hour of interesting work and thinking. I also wouldn’t underestimate the power of smaller moments of audience reflection, the kind that you don’t even signal by saying, “Now turn and talk,” the kind you instigate by dropping your voice for a second, or by looking at an artifact and modeling your own questions.

The accumulation of those big and small moments, plus some introduction, analysis, and conclusion from the presenter, describes many of my favorite talks.

Yeah, fair. My guess is “no, it isn’t” but it depends on what you mean by “do some math.” At what depth? For how long?

Thanks for stopping by our sessions, Ali.

I think you illustrate the need for some kind of Yelp for presenters. I mean, no one wants to give anyone a bad review, much less a public one, but these events are so expensive. We need to go into presentations with some reason to expect they’ll return the investment.

Actual lol.

So I am wondering how you think about that? I’m wondering how one makes a presentation in an environment like that *interactive*? What are ways to get the audience involved, and know they’re involved/engaged? The strategies I can think of are:

*talk to a neighbor
*work on a posed problem at your seat
*if there is cell service and/or wifi, use one of those polling sites
*have someone from the audience publicly share their thoughts on a posed question
and… that’s it.

I’m having trouble envisioning moments of engagement that involve something other than just listening to me and my co-speaker. So here are a few questions that I’d love help with (from you, or anyone else) if you think you have something to offer:

1. What are other strategies to get an audience member involved/engaged during the session?
2. Getting audience members involved is one way to “break up a talk” (so it isn’t 60 minutes of yammering). But what are other ways? I can only think of “show a video”!

I’ve rewritten this comment a few times, because it’s getting me to think more as I try to figure out what exactly I’m struggling with. And I think maybe I need to recognize that giving a 60 minute talk is something entirely different than planning a class. Yes, I’ll use *some* of the same skills, but they are fundamentally different beasts.

Always,
Sam