Any time you encounter a classroom or meeting setting, people automatically check out. The classic white walls, long presentation, and monotonous lecturing are enough to rock any enthusiastic employee right to sleep. Here are a few ways you can switch up your training tactics so that you keep people awake and engaged during the entire lesson:
Make it interactive
Lecturing is easier, but it is the least effective method of teaching. Even if you have your wonderfully typed out and designed PowerPoint presentation, you are still going to lose a large portion of your audience so don’t use that as a crutch. Studies show that interrupting a lecture every 10-15 minutes for an activity is the best way to keep people engaged.
Make it visual
Everyone learns in a slightly different way. For the people that learn by seeing, create a visual display around the room that will constantly cue them right back to the front and keep their minds on the topic being discussed. Use sketchnotes to create your visual! This will be a fun switch up from the usual pie chart or bar graph. Not only will this keep the attention on the topic, but it will also help them understand what exactly you’re teaching when they see it displayed visually.
Incorporate more writing and less reading
A great way to retain information is to write it out – there is a reason teachers made you take notes all those years in class! If you like to give handouts, don’t have them completely filled out to begin with. Create blanks, bullet points, and additional empty pages to keep people focused on what you’re saying so that they can get all the information down.
1, 2, 4, all
This is a method used to get every single person in the room engaged at the same time. After your presentation, ask a question to the group and then have them get in groups of 2, then 4, and finally all back together to discuss the answer. This is a way to get every person talking to each other, process the information presented and allow you to see what was retained from the topic discussed. Want to learn more about this technique? We love this post!
Time for reflection
Once you finish your presentation, complete the above step with specific questions and see what was retained from your talk. Evaluate what methods of the presentation itself were most effective for people by asking them what they deemed most helpful. You can easily read the engagement of your audience so take note of what kept them interested as well as what lost their attention.
Lisa
