Crafting Your Message. Tammy Heflebower
and considering these reflective practices will make you that much better. You may also find part 2 (page 87) particularly helpful in honing a new process or protocol. If you are newer to regular public speaking, begin with preparing an effective message (chapter 1, page 5), and move through the chapters in a consecutive manner. You will find that each piece builds upon those before it, culminating in a well-crafted message with ideas for delivering it dynamically.
Chapter 1
Preparing an Effective Message
Proper preparation and practice prevent poor performance.
—Robert Pike
Adult learners are different, and teaching adult educators is vastly different from teaching students. At best, adult learners can be interested, inspired, and enthusiastic, and at worst, they can be irked, jaded, and disrespectful. Let’s face it: some educator audiences will try to behave in ways they would never tolerate from their students. They may resist your greatest ideas and be wary of new, untested concepts. Often, this is because they have had experiences in the past that justified such skepticism. However, you have the power to prevent such negative reactions. How your audience responds is related directly to you and the message you are conveying.
This chapter takes an in-depth look into how you can tailor your presentations to be maximally effective in front of an adult audience. It begins by considering the needs of adult learners and introduces questions you can ask during the planning stage of your presentation to ensure you meet these needs. Advice for improving and augmenting your knowledge of the subject matter follows. Finally, this chapter discusses the differences that may exist in your audience members, specifically focusing on four distinct adult audiences, and provides useful ideas for how to present to an audience with diverse learning styles. All these features will help you better engage your audience and distinguish your presentation as different and inspiring.
The Needs of Adult Learners
In most instances, adults want to contribute and have their knowledge honored and respected. There are defining features of virtually all adult learning theories (Dunst & Trivette, 2012; Heflebower, 2018a; Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 2012; Kolb, 1984; Schön, 1983, 1987). Summarizing what the various authors espouse leads to the following four key components of adult learning.
1. Relevant: Adult learners are task- or problem-centered rather than simply topic-centered. They need to know why your training is important to them: What problem might this solve? How might this make their lives easier? The useful past experiences and insights adult educators possess provide them with knowledge about what is likely to work and what is not. Although adult learners are more readily able to relate new facts to past teaching and learning experiences, clearly connecting relevancy helps them buy into your message (Rall, 2017). If it is not relevant to their needs, they are not interested.
2. Practical: Adult learners consider the immediate usefulness of any new information (Rall, 2017). They are more impatient in the pursuit of learning, and they tend to be intolerant unless they can apply useful connections between your message and their practical problems. Adults bring their own experiences and knowledge into the training; they appreciate having their talents and information recognized and used during a teaching situation. Simply put, adults like learning that provides them with practical activities that build on their prior skills and knowledge.
3. Active: Adults want experiential learning. Adult participants are mature people and prefer to be treated as such. They learn best in a self-governing, participatory, and collaborative environment. They need to be actively involved in determining how and what they learn; they need active rather than passive learning experiences (Rall, 2017). Adults are self-reliant learners, and prefer to work a bit more at their own pace.
4. Positive: Mature learners appreciate appropriate humor and elements of entertainment infused into the learning environment. Adults are more intrinsically motivated than most students; they are enthused by internal incentives and curiosity, rather than external rewards. Adult learners are sometimes fatigued when they attend trainings, so they appreciate any teaching approaches that add interest and a sense of liveliness. Use a variety of methods and audiovisual aids, and try to incorporate a change of pace—anything that makes the learning process easier.
Thinking of these key components while crafting your message will ensure you meet the needs of adult learners. Asking yourself the questions in figure 1.1 can assist in planning your message. These questions should guide your initial planning for each of the four key components of adult learning through an effective message.
Figure 1.1: Planning questions for the four key components of adult learning.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/leadership for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Using these components and considering the planning questions will assist you in creating a thoughtful message. A great application is to use figure 1.1 (page 7) immediately to plan something you are about to present to an educator audience. Color-code each component on four different-colored sticky notes. During your planning phase, draft responses to the questions on the corresponding colored sticky notes and place them on a large surface, then clump each sticky note around others of the same color. This visual approach helps you start to see how your message will flesh out during a training process as you consider the various needs of adult learners. The purpose is to achieve balance with your ideas. You want to be certain that you have some ideas representing each color of sticky note. This way, you will be thoughtful about your message’s relevancy to your audience, practicality for immediate use, ability to actively engage others, and likelihood of infusing a positive tone. If you find you are missing a color, or you are too heavy in another, adjust accordingly.
Carl J. Dunst and Carol M. Trivette (2012) found that catering to different combinations of adult learning methods resulted in increased adult learner outcomes. First, they found that active learning was an important method of adult learning. They found that when adult learners are more actively involved in the learning process, larger effects about their knowledge, skills, attitudes, and self-efficacy are noted. Think about learning a new instructional strategy—maybe a new academic game to infuse into your training or classroom to increase engagement. When you learn the game by actually experiencing it, you get immediate feedback about what works and what doesn’t. As opposed to simply passively reading about the game, this pattern of new information, practice, and feedback helps you learn the skill incrementally, and this experiential application of learning increases retention.
Time usage is also of the essence. Dunst and Trivette (2009) found that smaller amounts of chunked content increased adult retention, as did training settings that accumulated twenty or more total hours. Recall the academic game analogy. Each time you broke the new skill into its component parts (chunked), then practiced, your brain was creating neural networks for learning that part of the game. Doing these small chunks repeatedly, with settling time for the brain in between, increases the permanence of the skill. When planning the most effective use of training time, think smaller increments interspersed with practice. For instance, you may use a professional development day to introduce an idea and provide time for planning and implementation. Then you can discuss the application of an idea and refine it during regular meeting times, like professional learning communities. Using these smaller time frames to chunk, reiterate, apply, and modify during small-session follow-ups over a sample three- to six-month period of time increases learners’ proficiency and