When planning your powerpoint presentation, you may find yourself thinking of ways to “spice up” your speech. You might start by adding photos, videos and jokes. You might streamline your key points, draw on examples from outside of ophthalmology, or make a correlation with current events. At some point during your brainstorming, you make come up with a humourous and engaging way to create “audience participation.”
After all, if your speech is “truly interesting,” than your audience should be dying to ask you questions! Why not get the ball rolling and build some collegiality between everyone in the room by “encouraging” them to talk?
There are many methods you could try, such as having each person in the room stand up and state their name and position. You could hand out props, or cards that the audience member reads at the appropriate slide. There are many team-building methods at your disposal, and these techniques are used by motivational “consultants” in the corporate setting.
Now, as good as these interactive ideas sound, don’t use them. That’s because:
Audience participation sucks!
Let me restate that:
FORCED audience participation in an ophthalmology presentation sucks!
Forcing your audience to speak out loud makes everyone nervous. You are basically throwing the discomfort of public speaking on those around you who have not prepared for this scrutiny.
The worse example of this the art of “pimping;” randomly calling on audience members to answer difficult questions. A throwback to traditional Socratic teaching, this potentially-humiliating style of education is not appropriate when presenting to your peers. You don’t want to alienate a collegue by revealing their ignorance.
Random questions are counterproductive: the audience becomes too focused on being called on to appreciate your message. This stress hinders people from learning anything. The potential for sudden and unexpected scrutiny from an entire room full of ophthalmologists makes people nervous. It’s like being night-call with a pager: even if you don’t get called in, you MIGHT … and this alone is stressful.
Speaking of “forced participation,” the worse medical lecture I’ve ever personaly experienced involved “team building” where my attending doctor forced me to Salsa dance with another resident. Shudder!
Ideally, you’ve presented so well that the audience will WANT to ask you questions. If they don’t ask questions at the end, then the fault is entirely yours. Either your topic is boring, too complicated, or you’ve presented yourself as an unapproachable or condescending lecturer.
In other words, audience participation is great … but ONLY if it is spontaneous! Be an interesting and pleasant speaker and your audience will want to ask you questions!
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