The Tipping Point with Professional Development

What makes one speaker so much more effective than others? As I am planning presentations for the Nebraska Educational Technology Association conference coming up next week, I keep thinking about to make my thoughts and projects “sticky” to others. The book the Tipping Point talks about the stickiness factor and how we make people believe what we are saying is important and worthy of listening to. According to Gladwell, “my facial expressions, gestures, postures, and movements determine how well people pay attention, and credibility of what I am saying. These small things determine how much my audience believes the message I am sending.”

According to most advertising agencies, there is usually one little thing in an ad campaign that changes everything. For one company it was simply using a metallic golden box on their mailers. Before the gold box, they had tried many more complex ideas, but they weren’t translating into any action on behalf of the customers. What any customer (or teacher) really wants is give them a short way to accomplish a task without doing anything extra. They want it to be easy and convenient. They want us to eliminate the clutter. Again, I think this is key to working with teachers. Just like kids with television programs, teachers in professional development seminars will watch when they understand, and look away when they are confused.

What is the gold box of my presentation? What is the memorable or meaningful little piece that changed everything? Is it my project choices? – they have to be really different from everything else they have seen in other sessions. Is it my handout? – can they use the links, have I made the reference web site or wiki space easy to find and easy to use? Is it my presentation itself? – are the slides that important, or could my sense of humor and voice more important to get them to pay attention? I would like to say that my experiences, the fact that “I have been there and done that” is what makes people want to listen to what I am saying – so it might be my credentials, notoriety, and biography. “It’s no just do you know somebody. It’s do you really know them well enough that you know their skills and abilities and passions… it’s knowing someone well enough to know what they know, and knowing them well enough so that you can trust them to know things in their specialty. It’s the re-creation, on an organization-wide level, of the kind of intimacy and trust that exists in a family.” Or could it be simply the session title and description? I think that might be the key – but how do you learn how to write a great session title and description that will pull in as many people as possible?