Much like Piers’ interest in citizen science, I have come to realise that I am fascintated by how people learn. We all know that “everyday is a school day”, and some “teachers” are better than others. If we can present an idea well, then surely it makes it easier for people to understand and learn it. Last week, Andrew, Anthony and I went on a refresher course for our presentation skills. I thoroughly enjoyed the course, and I think we all got different things out of it.
During my career I have been on many presentation skills courses, and of course attended many presentations. There are a handful of presenations that I can remember. I want my presentations to be the memorable ones. During our course I paid close attention to how people learn, and how they remember. Without taking business from Cameron at Front and Centre Training Solutions here is a short list of what I learnt.
- Three.
- Tell people more than about 3 things, and they won’t remember them
- Plan.
- Don’t write the presentation then ask yourself if it fits the objective afterwards!
- How do you remember things?
- Exactly. Recalling things, that is one way
- Repeating
- Making things relevant to your audience
We learnt many other things and agreed between us that we will help each other not to forget them. It is a great benefit to have several colleagues that were on the same course as we can learn from each other, and critique each others work.
Hopefully Andrew is not feeling pressured as he is presenting a paper at WALIS in November. We won’t heckle too much!
If you’d like to find out more about our course, drop me a line 9227 7309, or email me.
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