Kevin Smith’s approach to addressing any audience is the same as mine.
He writes in his recent memoir that whenever a person is speaking to a group, in any context, the speaker has a duty to be entertaining.
I couldn’t agree more.
I have attended hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of meetings over the course of my lifetime where the person making the presentation, conducting the workshop, or otherwise delivering the content made no effort to engage the audience in an entertaining and memorable way.
I will never understand this.
Regardless of who you are or what your previous experience might be, I believe that every person is capable of being entertaining and delivering content if they are willing to invest the time and effort required to prepare. This could involve humor, self-deprecation, storytelling, drama, or surprise. It could mean designing a presentation that enables meaningful, engaging interaction among attendees. It could include the use of food, props, or even a costume. Whatever it takes to make your presentation entertaining and memorable to your audience.
Smith argues that the speaker or presenter is obligated to be entertaining for the audience’s sake. It’s what I call The Spiderman Principle of Meetings and Presentations (though Voltaire admittedly said it first):
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
If you are conducting a one-hour meeting, you have effectively stolen one hour from every person in the room.
If there are 20 people in the room, you are now equivalent to a 20-hour investment.
It is therefore your responsibility to ensure that the hour is not wasted by reading from PowerPoint slides, providing information that could have been delivered via email, lecturing, pontificating, pandering, or otherwise boring your audience.
But I also believe that there is a second, equally important reason to be entertaining:
It is a more effective way of conveying content to an audience.
When a student-teacher presents me with a lesson that he or she would like to teach my class, my first question is always this:
What’s the hook? What is the reason for my students to listen and pay attention to you?
Far too often, inexperienced (and ineffective) teachers believe that if they design a lesson using all the methods and strategies they learned in college, students will sit quietly, attend fully, and absorb the content.
For about two-thirds of an average class of students, this will probably be the case. But for the other third, effective lesson design is never enough. These are the students who slip through the cracks in many classrooms. They are the kids who have the ability and potential but lack the necessary skills in order to learn. They are the children who are not predisposed to quiet, thoughtful attentiveness. They are the kids who can barely sit still. The ones with one foot still on the baseball diamond and one finger still on the video game controller. They are the students who do not believe in themselves or their capacity for a bright future. They are kids who come to school hungry and tired and still reeling from the chaos and violence of an evening at home.
These are the students who need a reason to listen.
I believe that it is the teacher’s responsibility to provide a reason to learn. A meaningful, entertaining, engaging, thrilling, fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants reason to keep their eyes, ears, and minds open.
This is why every lesson requires a hook.
A hook is not a statement like, “This material will be on Friday’s test” or “This is something you’ll use for the rest of your life.”
A hook is an attempt to be entertaining, engaging, surprising, thought-provoking, challenging, daring, and even shocking. This can be done in dozens, and perhaps hundreds of ways.
A teacher can be funny. Surprising. Animated. Confused. Even purposefully depressed. A teacher can offer students uncommon levels of choice or challenge them with a meaningful, winner-takes-all competition. A lesson can include something students have never seen before or (even better) something they have seen a thousand times before but in an entirely new context. A teacher can use storytelling, drama, and suspense to convey information. The lesson can include cooperative group learning that the children will actually enjoy. Students can be made the center of the lesson. Students can be invited to teach the lesson. Lessons can be broken into smaller, rapidly changing segments to hold students’ interest.
This is just a smidgen of the strategies that teachers can use, and most of them, if not all, can also be used by someone running a meeting, conducting a workshop, or otherwise stealing an hour from people to convey content.
This is how I approach teaching on an everyday basis. I believe with all my heart that I am stealing seven hours of each of my students’ childhoods every day. I am paid to be a thief. I rob my students of hour upon hour of the most precious and fleeting time of their lives. Therefore, I have a duty to make this time as meaningful, productive, memorable, and yes, entertaining as possible.
The best thing about all this:
If I do so, not only will my students be happy, but they will also look forward to school every day, and they will also learn better. Retain more. Become more skilled, knowledgeable, and equipped for all that life has to offer.
Whenever you are speaking to an audience, you have a duty to be entertaining. If you can’t or won’t, sit down and let someone else speak.
