4. Presentation Skills & Delivery Styles
(including facilitation)
Lastly on the Saturday we talked about delivery styles, of course, I find Patrick Winston’s “How to Speak” lecture super helpful here, for best practices when delivering a lecture, but I like how Jim used the combo of very light slides for context, then had the lion’s share of the sessions, especially as we got deeper into the course, being task-driven by us budding Coach Developers. In fact, he highlighted the range of ways we, as Coach Developers could help coaches, ranging from heavy touch like delivering a lecture to light touch where the CD might just advise and the coach does all the heavy lifting. There’s only so much of a person we can pass around, so as much fun as it is being directly involved in a real hands-on manner, sometimes that’s not going to be best for the person who’s meant to be doing the bulk of the learning, and your impact will be limited by just how much time and energy you have. Using some of these other methods (guided discovery, learner-initiated with CD advice, practice where the CD assigns tasks) will help us reach more potential coaches in more effective, impactful ways.
What I Do Well
Presentation
I’m pretty comfortable giving talks, especially volleyball or coding ones, with the aid of slides, and I’d say my slides are pretty good. I used to have my software demo’d by the master presenter, Steve Jobs, himself, so I think I picked up a few good habits or two from him and his team.
In the USYVL1, as a site director, I was good at demoing the drills our new parent coaches would be performing with their players and emphasizing the key coaching points for a session. Each site was like a little coach developer workshop every week, as parents were enlisted to coach their own kids, and given coaching at the start of each session to help them along. Site directors would roam the venue during play time to help out, offer advice, feedback, to make the coaches feel as comfortable as possible. For a lot of the parents, they’d tell us at the end of a season how gratifying it was to coach their own kid, and that for many of them it was the first time they felt comfortable coaching a sport. I just loved their setup, and would love to see the same here in Ireland, for sure.
Delivery
In terms of delivery, I have done a lot of COMMAND delivery style in the past (and present), where I, the Coach Developer, makes all the decisions. And I’ve tried, in recent times, to move to a more PRACTICE, SELF-CHECK, or GUIDED DISCOVERY delivery style, where participants work though tasks prescribed by the Coach Developer, and the CD is still there to steady the ship in the event of struggles, but I have seen the improvement in people taking more ownership and pride in their growth when they’re doing more of their work.
Facilitation
I’m very good at responding to participants questions and their answers to questions when I’m facilitating. I try to always be positive and make the person feel heard and, at the very least, happy they made an effort, even if their answer wasn’t all the way there. And in handling questions, I do love relying on the “Ask 3 Then Me” rule from CoderDojo and any teacher coding workshop I run.
I also try to make good use of my voice2. Over the years I’ve gotten better at pausing, holding a good pace, especially when working with non-native English speakers. And, when needed, on rare occasions, I can ramp it up pretty loud. :)
What Could I Improve
Presentation
I wish my drawing skills were better, for use on a whiteboard or even paper, but I suppose I’ll have to fall back on Keynote diagrams and chicken scratch, for now, when it comes to drawing to present something.
I would also like to make sure that I’m sure I’m using listening and questioning more effectively in my presentations… leave room for the class or session to open up and grow a little more organically and fit around the participants a little better. AND I really would like to incorporate more intentional, well-constructed storytelling in the sessions. I’m always advising kids and adults building apps or teaching coding to tell a story to better cement the subject or the app idea in someone’s head, and need to take my own advice on that one more often, for sure3.
Delivery
On the delivery front, I’d love to see more LEARNER-INITIATED and INDIVIDUAL delivery styles… these are where, in the first instance, the learner plans their own learning program, and the Coach Developer advises. And in the second, the Coach Developer can suggest the broad topic, and the participant goes off and plans their own program.
Facilitation
When I’m training trainers online I’m very good at sitting still, because I’m glued to a chair… but put me in front of a room or in a hall and the movement just explodes out of me. So when I’m speaking, I, for sure, need to cut down on unnecessary movement and work on being still when facilitating a group in person.
I also tend to do a lot on my phone… usually with an app I wrote, of course, and it’s always in service of staying on the agenda or capturing some metric or note-taking of some kind. But I do understand that the simple presence of a phone can signal inattention, so I need to invest in some decent small notebooks, work on my handwriting so I can read it, and use those for notes, note-taking. Later in the practical sessions we would run at Shinma Integrated College I also liked the use of a simple, clunky stopwatch, for monitoring time. I tend to use the AppleWatch, but, again, I can see how reacting to the thing on my wrist might seem like I’m dismissing texts or other messages when I’m just setting or resetting timers to mark the time.
I’d love to incorporate more props, like Professor Winston talked about, as a way of making something really stick — the example he gives of the physics professor who used the huge swinging pendulum in the classroom as a real-life example of conservation of energy would be such a powerful image for the concept he was teaching that it’ll resonate for ages.
US Youth Volleyball League, I *loved* working with these guys, Randy Sapoznick is just brilliant. https://www.usyvl.org
Fun fact: for better or worse, me reading a book out loud to my wife will instantly put her in a comatose state. I’m not entirely sure if this is a good or bad thing.
I can just picture every player I’ve ever coached now going, “Oh god, now we’re going to get stories that just go for ages and don’t have a point and just meander… if I have to hear about the mid-90s Vassar College Men’s Volleyball team one more time…”