Tuesday, November 03, 2015

Teaching Tip #40




Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #40

Another book that really impacted my teaching last year was Carmine Gallo’s Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the Worlds’ Top Minds.

Tip #6 - lighten up

Out of all the examples given on how to deliver a TED Talk, this is the one that is easiest for me.  

Humor is so effective.  If you want to see humor used amazingly in a TED Talk go watch the most popular one of all time, Do Schools Kill Creativity by Ken Robinson.



One that is even better than that is Shawn Archor’s The Happy Secret to Better Work.


Now it doesn’t have to be slap-stick.  But humor always works for me to engage my students and win them over.

It might be a smart-alec remark about something that happened to me on the way to work.  It might be an embarrassing moment that happened to me at home.  It might be a wise crack about what one of my students is wearing.

The point is to get them to relax through humor.  That makes all the other factors in a great presentation work more effectively.


What I have found that works best for me is to combine this with tip #2 (master the art of story telling).

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