Monday, October 28, 2013

You're Just Not That Interesting

Think of someone that you feel is (or would be) incredibly interesting to hear speak.  Picture that person being tremendously knowledgeable, and someone who does things that are incredibly germane to your current situation--where you are at in your career, where you are at in your school, or your classroom.  Imagine that each example they gave and each story they told ended in you vigorously nodding your head in agreement and scribbling down notes at a furious pace.  Pretend that you are shushing even your best friend sitting beside you so that you can catch every last sound bite and syllable before you jump up to give them a raucous ovation.  Do you have that person in mind? Does that person exist for you?
If that person does exist (and they certainly could, as I have one or two in mind), for how long could you sit and listen?  An hour? Two or three hours?  An entire day?  And to that end, how long could you LEARN from them?

Because when I look in the mirror each morning, I come to the same conclusion about myself:  "You know what, you just aren't that interesting."

Now don't get me wrong, I find myself to be quite amusing.  Personally, I really enjoy my stories.  I feel as though I am reasonably well read.  I can doctor up one heck of a Powerpoint slide, and have a couple of really cool YouTube videos that will dazzle the few people in the room that have not seen them before.  I am pretty sure that several people have snorted and guffawed during my sessions.  But really and truly, I can probably keep a group of adults on task for about as many minutes as I have fingers before they are thinking about the blinking light on their phones or what they need to do later that day.  Because the truth of the matter is, the likelihood of me satisfying more than one or two conditions from the first paragraph of this post are actually quite low.

And I am fine with that.  Because I truly believe that "you learn the work by doing the work."
This phrase would be a familiar refrain to anyone.  And I am not just referring to educators--I would guess that in occupations ranging from a steelworker, to a doctor, to a chef in a restaurant, even to a parent--you need to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty in order for deep learning to occur (and as a relatively new parent, I certainly have learned that the hard way!).

So what if we made it a primary objective in education to spend as little time as possible talking to our learners and as much time available out getting them to DO the work?  And when I am speaking about learners, I am referring to students AND adults.  To our kids, and our teachers, administrators, and senior staff.

This is not to say that direct instruction does not have its place--it does, and when done well, this method can be quite effective.  If you don't believe me, read this presentation of Visible Learning by John Hattie:  you will see that direct instruction ranks 24th out of 130 factors that influence students achievement in terms of effectiveness.  And when I am at a conference or attending a professional development session, there are times that I really want to tune in to the great minds and educational visionaries and listen to how they think.  I sincerely find those sessions fascinating, and tend to walk away feeling invigorated.

On Friday and Saturday, I had the pleasure of listening to some great keynotes and panel discussions from educational futurist Simon Breakspear and from Connected Principal George Couros.  From knowing George through Twitter and from previous presentations and as well as from reading Simon's bio, I was equally excited to see both speakers.

Simon had a number of key ideas that resonated with me.  He reinforced the idea that we get better not by doing more, but by doing things differently.  He encouraged us as school administrators to encourage wild ideas, risk-taking and curiosity from our students and our faculties.  He talked about the "equity imperative"--how we need to keep every student on our agenda all of the time.  And perhaps most important for me, he described "educational ecosystems", in which need to construct learning situations that are specific to our students, our teachers, our parents, and our communities, (he even mentioned our budgets!) because we do have differing ecosystems from school to school.

George also pushed my thinking, but more on an emotional level.  He illustrated the power that social media can have on creating positive and deep interpersonal connections:  his message spoke to me as an educator, but also as a human being and as a father to my children.

But coming back to my initial point, Simon and George certainly engaged me as a listener.  But I do think it is exceedingly difficult for anyone (especially yours truly) to keep a group of learners "locked in" for a very long period of time or evoke meaningful and deep learning without

  • deliberate strategies to engage those learners, along with
  • lateral accountability mechanisms to require (yes, require) their participation and require the learning of the concepts and skills being presented.

And furthermore, I think any presenter can do this with any audience of any size.  I believe this because of the idea of lateral accountability--the accountability to the people around you.  If I am speaking to five hundred people, of course each of those people can't be accountable to me, and moreover, why would they?  But they certainly can be accountable to the five or six people around them.  They can certainly do an activity with the two people beside them.  The person beside them can report the results of that activity to a third party, thus ensuring that they had to listen in the first place.  Two small groups can compare their thoughts on a case study with each other.  People can (gasp!) turn to someone they don't know, talk to them, and learn from them.  It just takes a very conscious and highly purposeful effort to construct the activities and the time within a presentation to do so.

To paraphrase Douglas Fisher, author of Productive Group Work--How to Engage Students, Build Teamwork and Promote Understanding, we can maximize the interactions in the room.  We can maximize the interactions between the participants themselves, and maximize the interactions between the participants and the content and ideas that we are presenting.  Because the assumption that we must make is that we are presenting ideas and information that we want people to learn.  And if we want people to learn, should we not utilize practices that we know require learning?  Maybe I am crazy.  But one thing is for sure.

I'm just not that interesting.  

And I need every one of those strategies I can get.  If you have strategies that you feel are particularly engaging for presentations, please share--I truly want to make my presentations better.  



13 comments:

  1. Great post, Cale. I enjoyed your session the other day and so did my colleagues, and more importantly, I saw some of those strategies get used this week. Thanks for the insights on learning and for making me laugh this am. PJ

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  2. Hey man...Always love our conversations and I talked about this with you in person but I think it is imperative. Sometimes it is essential that we do sit and listen to others to get the content and context. It is impossible to get people to listen to anyone for 90 minutes, because there are some ideas that someone has never heard, and other ideas that people have heard for the first time. I would say that for me to be successful in people "doing the work" that I did with them on Saturday, they had to see why it was vital. Just pushing people to something doesn't get them to buy in, no matter the experience. We have to take time to get them to understand deeper meaning. The stuff I talked about on Friday might have made sense to you, but would have been totally new to others.

    If there is no content, what do we have to create from? There has to be a balance. It is not one or another.

    What you did here is imperative. You took your experiences and reflected on them making you understand this in a much deeper way. That is great but not all people see the value in it.

    I will tell you straight up that a lot of times I am "doing activities" in my work that are assigned by others, but I don't get the value of WHY we are doing it in the first place so I do not engage myself in the process. I keep going back to Simon Sinek's video on "start with the why"; if you can't define the importance of something, then why do it? People will check out of those experiences as well.

    It is not one or another (and I know that you are not saying that), but a balance of both.

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    1. While this post was not about your presentation, it is interesting to read what you have said. From my perspective, there are so many things that can be done as a presenter to engage the audience, regardless of whether it is in content (which I'm not sure if you are saying your presentation was content?), or context. For example, you said that "The stuff that I talked about on Friday might have made sense to you, but would have been totally new to others." Excellent point--but how do you know that? What if the whole room knew about everything that you said? While totally absurd and unlikely, here’s the point--what an opportunity to engage the audience right off the bat-- a presenter could (should?) do a quick little online poll with their smartphones with 3-5 short questions that might help the presenter gauge the audience and what their prior knowledge is about a particular topic, and then display the results. The audience is in! The audience is interacting with the presenter, AND gets a sense of the audience in large room AND touches a bit of technology they can use tomorrow. That would be pretty cool. Time elapsed? Less than two minutes.

      Continuing on that vein, if the goal of a presentation were to demonstrate why a particular concept is vital to the success of an organization, is the best way to do that by standing and delivering? This is where I find that I am just not that interesting (not saying you). I say this without presupposition, yet pedagogical practices would dictate that speaking/reciting anecdotes would be but one method--and, I believe there are a variety of others that we MUST use in order for the audience to learn. I believe learning is the goal of any professional developer, and the success of a presentation should be whether people have actually applied that learning (or one might say that they have not actually learned anything?).

      For example, If the critical piece of a presentation is to see the importance and ‘power of being connected', what if the product at the end of the presentation was to have every person in the room BE CONNECTED-- to three or four other people in the room that they didn't know before through a task that required them to get up and find a way through email, Twitter, Facebook (or whatever they had) to connect to three or four new people? That would be powerful and the possibilities endless. You talked about how cool it was to get your parents on to Facebook (and it was very cool), so wouldn’t it be cool to have a Facebook group created prior to the session for the conference and have people join it right there, and interact with each other during the presentation and forever after? So it would take a minute or four, who cares? And I am writing this while making tacos for my kids, so not too high on the creativity marks, but that took twenty one seconds to come up with. Call it lame I guess, I call it people learning the work by doing the work, seeing the power of being connected by experiencing the power of being connected.

      My point is, what if we took 15% of the time that we were allotted as presenters and made one commitment: that we would design activities for that amount of time that would ensure that every person in the room interacted with each other AND with the content in a way that ensured that they would have more to take away than memories and a few scant notes? You said it yourself, it is impossible to engage an audience for an entire 90 minutes, and I agree--you can’t. And neither can I. Which I believe is my point...I am just not that exciting, and but I’m not willing to accept that the simple act of speaking is the best that I can do to engage learners.

      For others who are more exciting, I guess they don’t have to resort to using things like literacy strategies, technology and the rest of the audience to engage the members of the audience and to take advantage of the collective intelligence of the room. But I do.

      As Bill Ferriter would say. “Rock right on!”

      Back to tacos. Which are now cold.

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    2. I found your presentation on October 25 excellent. You were interesting, thoughtful, relevant and full of meaningful, innovative and tech-infused ideas a school-based leader could try now with staff. You are a natural and engaging speaker with a good sense of humour. I found myself thinking, "this guy is good and he must be a very effective principal..." (and I've been doing this 7 years longer than you).

      As for interacting with others at a conference, I enjoy sharing ideas/thoughts with table members, occasionally getting into like-minded or opposing groups, talking about questions or collaborating on authentic tasks and then sharing out, etc. I do not like contrived or forced interaction - like changing tables or being required to get up and move around the room frequently and for no particular reason. We all have different learning styles and, unlike the kid in Science 9 (insert mandatory course), we all chose to attend your session out of curiosity and interest - to listen, to think and to reflect later.

      Thank you,
      Jim

      p.s. by the way, if we're all watching the World Series and Big Papi hits one out and the Red Sox win, high fives all around. Getting up mid-presentation and high-fiving strangers, not so much.

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    3. Thanks for taking the time to respond, Jim! And thanks for your kind words as well. My point is that if, as a presenter, I approach my audience with the idea that they have come to learn, I need to approach the topic using (gasp!) the principles of learning, and how my audience might learn best. While using a variety of different presentation and engagement techniques might not engage every single learner, I believe the odds are significantly higher using multiple modalities than using the good old "I'll just tell 'em" technique. In Simon's presentation this past weekend, we all giggled when he said "And I fully acknowledge the irony of me standing here lecturing to you about how education in our classrooms needs to change.".

      I hear what you are saying about forced interaction--it is often uncomfortable to move to other tables, to talk to strangers, and I don't love it either. However, in a time when we are asking children and educators to move out of their comfort zones on a day-to-day basis, we administrators need to get uncomfortable, and need to model the importance of taking risks. And let's be honest--it's not like we are asking each other to climb Mount Everest without oxygen, just go talk to someone from another district and see what they are doing, and how they think. I guess where I come from is this: do I want teachers to create activities that require students to be engaged, that require them to connect with other people, and require their participation in tasks that make them uncomfortable but require (rather than invite) them to learn, even when it is a stretch for the student? And to that end, do I want the educators in my school to be in professional development activities that require their participation and learning? My answer is YES, and so I better model that I am willing to jump in and do those things as well. And moreover, I want not just to learn, I want to be able to design and implement something as a result--the best way to do that is to DO it.

      Thanks again.

      GO SOX!

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  3. Hey Pal,

    From what I heard about your presentation -- and yes, people were talking about it -- you are more interesting than you give yourself credit for!

    But I completely dig your idea of lateral accountability being important. If people are accountable to one another -- something that you can create through frequent opportunities for interaction -- then they are more likely to engage in the content and the concepts with one another.

    My PD mentor is Cassie Erkens and she always likes to say, "The one who is doing the talking is the one who is doing the learning." That means in a delivery-centered presentation, the presenter is learning a ton.

    I keep that in mind when I'm planning PD sessions and I've built a ton of "challenge points" into my presentations. A challenge point is when I slap up one of my provocative slides whether it is directly connected to the topic of the presentation or not and then give people the chance to turn-and-talk about the slide.

    I do several challenge points at the start of each presentation to cement the expectation and to give people the chance to practice interacting. Then, they're not surprised when that practice repeats later in the presentation. I also introduce extra challenge by stopping conversation in some challenge points and forcing people to argue the opposite side of the story that they started by arguing.

    Anyway -- hope you dug the world series. I hate the Red Sox, but was jazzed just knowing how much fun you were probably having watching the games.

    Rock right on,
    Bill

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  4. Cale, I completely agree with your desire to connect. George and Simon were great speakers and I was about as engaged as I ever get, but my most effective learning came in the side conversations and connections I made while at the conference. If the smartest person in the room is the room itself, we need time to talk to the room. If we extrapolate this to the learners in our schools, we need to give them strategies and time to connect with other learners. Teachers just aren't that interesting either. Someone should tell them that.

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  5. Hey Cale...Interesting to read the comments posted here and I wanted to come back because I knew you would reply. I thought that this was interesting:

    "My point is, what if we took 15% of the time that we were allotted as presenters and made one commitment: that we would design activities for that amount of time that would ensure that every person in the room interacted with each other AND with the content in a way that ensured that they would have more to take away than memories and a few scant notes?"

    If you do not sell me on why I should be doing what YOU as the presenter think I should be doing, how do you know that I will engage? You Facebook example might be relevant to some people, but how would you even know that is relevant to me? Facebook might be blocked in my school and I could simply say, "we can't use this so why would I even bother?"

    The other thing that makes a difference in this talk is the difference between people that pick a session and ones that it is mandatory. If you are running a session on "connecting with colleagues", all of the people have chosen to be there. Keynotes are somewhat different as that might be the only choice at that time.

    There is a difference also in PD that you are doing with your staff as opposed to a conference because you know people differently and that relationship piece is so crucial. Watch the best speakers (Sir Ken is the first one that comes to my mind) and he spends time building rapport with his audience. The reality of this is that this rapport is one way and the larger the audience, the harder to build (back and forth) relationships with people.

    How often are you sitting in a PD session and someone says, "Everyone get up." They are trying to get people engaged, but I for one hate this. Again, this is a teacher focused suggestion, not an understanding of what the learner needs. People in my district know that this is not my comfort zone so no one pushes that because they know me; you doing a workshop might not have a clue. You might also encourage discussion at a table on a topic and those can often go awry as well.

    I guess what I am trying to say is that no one method, mine, yours, or anyone's is going to hit anyone. And if you really think about it, does the deep learning happen DURING the session or after when we have time to reflect? Kyle's comment about the conversations that happened after the talks were the most valuable for learning, and I would agree. You, Chris and I had a great conversation about Simon's talk when there was 30 minutes allotted to that time but if it was not for some good ideas shared by Simon, what would we have talked about? That's why I love longer breaks at conferences as opposed to working something in formal. I get to choose how I want to process. It might be by writing, it might be by connecting with someone, it might be by shutting down and thinking about it later.

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  6. Part 2 (wouldn't let me post my whole comment)

    I like listening to keynotes and then spending my time writing after the process. I like listening to Ted Talks. Sometimes collaboration is too much for me and in a recent book I was reading, the author suggests that sometimes collaboration face-to-face is worse than doing the same online. Why? Because it is often 1-2 people dominating conversations and many people are often too shy to speak up or steer the conversation. Is that really effective collaboration?

    There is no answer that is right here and I hate extremes. I can get a lot out of someone speaking for 90 minutes even if I only listen to them for 60. Is that bad? Even if they took 30 minutes of that 90 to engage me in another way, I still might only participate for only 60 no matter what they do.

    Does it have to be 100%?

    The other question that I have when thinking about this is that a lot of the ownership is placed on the "teacher" as opposed to the "learner". Personally, one of my biggest shifts is that my learning is my responsibility and if a keynote or workshop bombs, I always have the opportunity to take my learning in any place that I want to go. If I am learning but not on task, is that bad? Just some thoughts from reading the comments here.

    Thanks for the post Cale...I know you are passionate about this area based on our recent conversations.

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  7. Thanks for your comments George. For me, I come back to the basic premises of Elmore - "You learn the work by doing the work", and "task predicts performance". Without having tasks in which there is a product that provides evidence of learning, I can't be sure that learning has occurred. If my goal is to ensure that my staff (or a larger group people that have taken the time to hear me speak) have actually learned something, the few minutes it takes to build in activities that utilize the lateral accountability of the participants in the room are worth the loss of few extra syllables that I would have blathered on about instead.

    I do find it surprising that you talk about activities that "you hate" doing and because of that, people don't push you...let me alter your sentence above somewhat and see how it plays with you:

    "How often are you sitting in a PD session and someone says, "You need to be CONNECTED" They are trying to get people CONNECTED, but I for one hate this. Again, this is a PRESENTER-focused suggestion, not an understanding of what the learner needs. People in my district know that this is not my comfort zone so no one pushes that because they know me"

    Would you accept this as a plausible response from an educator not wanting to try something new (like utilizing social media, or whatever a presenter wanted you to learn)? I am thinking not a chance, but you are saying those other people don’t do that to you because ‘they know you’?

    At BCPVPA you talked about how you wanted to push people in the room, and to say things that might take them and others out of their comfort zone or where they feel safe (an example might be when you spoke about districts and schools unblocking things like Facebook). In fact, most of what you talked about was designed to push people out of their comfort zone, was it not? To confront their thoughts about social media by showing it's power?

    But I guess as a teacher or presenter I shouldn't push participants there because I ‘don't know ‘ them? I shouldn't push participants to learn something new or do something different because participants 'might not like' that style? Now that I know, I won’t push you any harder here either :)

    I have learned a great deal about how I want to present (should I ever be asked again) in the future from our comments--thanks for sharing, George!

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