Filmmaker Kevin Smith’s approach to addressing any audience is the same as mine. He writes in his memoir that anytime a person speaks to a group of people, of any size, 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 throughout my lifetime in which the person making the presentation, conducting the workshop, or otherwise delivering the content has 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 while delivering content if they are willing to invest the time and effort required to prepare.
This could involve the use of humor, self-deprecation, storytelling, drama, or surprise. It could mean designing a presentation that allows for meaningful and engaging involvement and interaction. You could add the element of competition to the presentation. You could be presenting especially compelling, supremely useful information or unique insight. It could include the use of food or 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 sake of the audience. 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. 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 they would like to teach my class, my first question is always this:
“What’s the hook? What’s 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 of the methods and strategies they have learned in college, students will sit quietly, attend fully, and absorb the content.
This will probably be the case for about two-thirds of an average class of students. 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 with the ability and potential but lack the necessary skills 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 on the videogame 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. They need to be excited about learning.
I believe 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, or 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 meaningful, winner-takes-all competitions. 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 and drama and suspense to convey information. The lesson can include cooperative learning in groups 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 up into smaller, rapidly changing, multi-modal segments to hold student interest.
This is just a smidgen of the strategies teachers can use, and most of them, if not all, can also be used by a person running a meeting, conducting a workshop, or otherwise stealing an hour from people in order 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 their childhood from each of my students 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, and not only will they look forward to school every day, but they will also learn better. Retain more. Become more skilled and knowledgeable and equipped for all that life has to offer.
Happy children make teaching much easier.
The same holds true when conducting a meeting. Happy, engaged, entertained adults also make the job of delivering content easier.
Start with happiness, and everything else falls into place.
Entertain your audience, and they will almost certainly be happy.
