Cows in the Classroom: Is it A.D.D. or me?

It is always frustrating as a classroom instructor or lecturer to face a sea of blank stares when you pose a question to your students. (Hello 8:30am music theory students!) Online, it is even worse as you are simply met by awkward silence and people checking email and YouTube. This situation is not necessarily an indicator of boredom or being thick as a brick; rather, it is often a symptom of how you are presenting the material. Before you start spraying the air with Ritalin, acting all Jack Black School of Rock cool, or randomly putting people on the spot to scare them into paying attention, consider some of my suggestions.

After several minutes of being talked at or shown things, the audience enters a "passive learning" state much like watching TV. They may well be absorbing the information or at least paying attention. However, when you suddenly switch gears and ask a question, the audience has to come out of the passive state and start constructing a response, which takes some time and effort. This often creates the deer in headlights or blank cow look that distresses many presenters.

Asking questions is good (the so-called Socratic method), but if you're going to involve the audience the rules of the game need to be more clear. One strategy is to constantly pepper your presentation with questions, instead of simply telling a story or explaining a concept.

"So what do you think The Hag did after I sent the retaliatory memo?" [Audience response.] "No, she didn't fire me, instead she actually called in sick for 6 weeks!"

This can be risky if your audience starts taking over to class, but with adults this is probably not an issue. Also it can be annoying to people who would rather sit in the back and just take it in passively, but tough for them. You can probably improvise this pretty well though, and it allows you to constantly gauge the audience's involvement and comprehension, so you can modify your pace as needed.

Another approach is something we might do in e-Learning more than classroom. You could say, "I'm now going to tell you a story for 10 minutes, and then we're going to talk about it." So you start with some "passive" presentation of a known duration. Then you switch gears with ample warning and do some back and forth with the audience for 10 minutes or so. That way, people have a chance to switch modes, and also may listen more actively to the initial presentation. Notice that this version requires a more structured content outline and a lot more planning. One probably couldn't improvise this very effectively. However, you could create some pretty fun graphics to illustrate your points, which would really help keep attention and aid retention. We learn best when we're getting information "multi-modally" from both eyes and ears.

So that would be my last suggestion...if you really want people to remember something, 1) make it a focal point of your presentation, not just a sidebar, and 2) present it visually as well as verbally. What I end up remembering are things shown to me or things that were most entertaining -- in other words, those which I created my own visuals for. So, as a member of the audience I make a little movie in my head of the battle with The Cubicle Hag. I can then build an association between the Hag story and the take-away lesson about not taking abuse in the workplace.

One last idea would be to break up your content into bite-sized pieces, and change it up frequently. You could call this the Sesame Street model, or perhaps MTV. Perhaps a series of blog posts as opposed to a journal with hefty articles. I wouldn't go as far as verbal Twittering live in the classroom, but that sure would be interesting to see in practice.

(Image from http://www.kendallgiles.com)