WeBlog
  • Agile Culture
    • Agile methodologies
    • Skills and expertises
    • Creativity and innovation
  • Management and Organization
    • Leadership
    • Work ethic
    • Team collaboration
  • Tech and Digital
    • DevOps and Craftsmanship
    • User experience and Digital Delivery
    • Data and Cybersecurity
  • EN
No result found
View all result
Discover Wemanity
WeBlog
  • Agile Culture
    • Agile methodologies
    • Skills and expertises
    • Creativity and innovation
  • Management and Organization
    • Leadership
    • Work ethic
    • Team collaboration
  • Tech and Digital
    • DevOps and Craftsmanship
    • User experience and Digital Delivery
    • Data and Cybersecurity
  • EN
No result found
View all result
Discover Wemanity
WeBlog

4 Principles to Engage Your Audience and Accelerate the Learning Process

by Wemanity
03/2016
in Management and Organization
4 Principles to Engage Your Audience and Accelerate the Learning Process

After 8 months of giving workshops and conferences, we gathered a great amount of information on how to share knowledge efficiently. We identified 4 main principles to better engage your audience and help participants assimilate content more easily.

1. Show them why the thing you are teaching will be useful to them

When teaching something, might it be mathematics, chemistry, programming or any other subject it is important to always explain the purpose of what you are teaching. Showing real-life examples of what can be achieved with the concepts you are teaching will really help participants appreciate its value. When people don’t see the purpose of your explanation, their attention drops.

In many ways, teaching can be compared to selling. When selling something, you want to show all the amazing things you can (will be able to) do with it so that the person really wants to buy it. When teaching something, it’s the same. Show your participants how much better they will become after your training, tease their attention. Because in the end: “People don’t buy products, they buy better versions of themselves”.

2. For your audience to grab concepts faster, relate them as much as possible to what they already know

When explaining abstract or unfamiliar concepts, it is important to relate them as much as possible to what people already know. This comparison process will not only help your participants to grab the concept faster, it will also increase your audience’s engagement.

Let’s take an example, if you had to explain HTML and CSS to your mother, giving theoretical definitions probably wouldn’t make much sense to her. Instead, if you were to compare the two with known concepts such as the structure of a car and the painting, this comparison would allow her to relate a lot more on known examples to conceptualise the idea and understand it faster.

3. Adapt to your audience

When teaching a new programming language or a new tool, your first step will be to identify your audience. Who are you teaching to? How familiar is your audience with the concepts that you will be explaining?

Programming is based on logic. Even though languages have their discrepancies, it is easy to relate one language to another through some of their concepts. Although written differently, Ruby’s closure will be linked to JavaScript’s closure as will Python’s. Once the logic is understood, it becomes a lot easier for the person to grab all the new concepts.

If your audience’s level has discrepancies, try to smooth these out as much as possible. Should the level difference be too big, you might want to think about splitting your group in sub groups to avoid losing too much time explaining concepts that others already master.

4. To eat an elephant, slice it into smaller pieces

To make a goal appear more attainable, it is important to give your audience the impression that each step that will lead them towards the end goal is easily achievable.

Look at the example below. With this two-step process, it is highly probable that your participants will lose their initial motivation, the second step being way too complex compared to the first one.

Google Street didn’t start by saying “We’ll photograph each and every street in the world”. They started with a city, expanded to another, and another and so on until they finally reach a worldwide collection of photos.

By breaking down your end goal into small and achievable steps, you’ll accompany your participants towards the objective you want them to reach. With too big steps, you risk losing them along the way.

Conclusion

Applying those 4 simple principles to our conferences and workshops increased both our audience engagement and the learning process of our participants. On average, the feedbacks improved by 20% since we apply these techniques.

As strong believer in the learning by doing method at Philos, we’re sure there is still room for improvement. So don’t worry, if we stumble upon new principle, we’ll keep you posted! 😊

Have you tried these techniques yourself? What were your results? Do you have other techniques to share? If so, do not hesitate to list them below 

Happy coding!

Wemanity

Wemanity

Related posts

a group in company training around a table
Agile Culture

How to Create Relevant Training Groups?

Deploying a training program on an entreprise scale is more and more wanted by big organisations. The same training unit...

5 months ago
kick-off meeting
Agile Culture

How to Make Your Kick-Off Meeting a Success?

Are you going to launch a new project, a software, or a new team, and most of all you want...

7 months ago
RTE
Agile Culture

Switching from Scrum Master to Release Train Engineer (RTE)? It is possible!

Are you a Scrum Master aiming for a career evolution? The RTE job is something to dig into, for sure!...

9 months ago
5 Things to Know about Flipped Teaching
Management and Organization

5 Things to Know about Flipped Teaching

You might have heard of flipped teaching, a trend first introduced by the educational system in order to help some...

10 months ago

Recommended

Agility at Scale: How to Deploy It With SAFe?

Agility at Scale: How to Deploy It With SAFe?

July 26, 2021
Don't Stop the Transformation!

Don’t Stop the Transformation!

March 27, 2020
green server

Can My IT Architecture Be Eco-Friendly?

December 10, 2022
Misconceptions About Agile: Be Aware of What You're Getting Into

Misconceptions About Agile: Be Aware of What You’re Getting Into

September 14, 2016

Categories

  • Agile Culture
  • Management and Organization
  • Tech and Digital
  • Transformation & Change
Powered by Wemanity logo

Categories

  • Agile Culture
  • Management and Organization
  • Tech and Digital
  • Transformation & Change

Join our community and receive our newsletter.

Rejoignez notre communauté et recevez nos dernières actus.

Sluit je aan bij onze community en verkrijg onze newsletter.

No result found
View all result
  • Agile Culture
    • Agile methodologies
    • Skills and expertises
    • Creativity and innovation
  • Management and Organization
    • Leadership
    • Work ethic
    • Team collaboration
  • Tech and Digital
    • DevOps and Craftsmanship
    • User experience and Digital Delivery
    • Data and Cybersecurity
  • EN