Your job is not to please the audience; your job is to engage the audience

My dental hygienist was telling me about her goal to finish her degree and enter a graduate program. I asked how it was going. “Well, I was going to enroll in one class…but I heard from other students that it was all lecture. All lecture doesn’t work for me.”

Does “all lecture” work for you…as the learner? How many times have all of us sat in a classroom, workshop, even a “lecture hall” (!) only to emerge wondering if we would ever get that hour back again in our life. Yet it continues to be the coin of the realm at professional meetings, classrooms, and even ‘motivational’ programs that we actually pay for!

The American philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, cautioned that education ought to help us know more and do more… “this intimate union of theory and practice aids both” he concluded. That was years ago and yet for many professionals, the lecture, to know more, overshadows the do more, again and again.

When Nora Dunn of the early Saturday Night Live show attended one of my classes at Columbia College Chicago she advised our acting students, “Your job is not to please the audience; your job is to engage the audience” and then she added that it is in the engagement that we are pleased. Many teaching Kindergarten through University know very well how important it is to stop the lecture only method…our students don’t tolerate it very well…and they tell us so!

But at our professional meetings, how many times do you really get to meet those at your table? Or those at the next table? Or on Zoom how many emails are you able to get through when the lecture begins?

So I invite you to reflect on your experience of learning. Are you like my dental hygienist? Or are you like the tens of thousands this week who will sit and listen and then hear the common statement, “Looks like we don’t have time for Q&A.” Make this a key consideration next time you are the one doing the teaching!