Great Lectures; Great Presentations Save

Great lectures, great presentations. How do you get there? What are the best practices? You know, I've given tons of lectures in my career. I've learned a bit about doing it right.

I'm still learning. I still want to give that perfect lecture. And lord knows, I've certainly changed a lot over the years. I've always been a big proponent of the see one, do one, teach one sort of approach to learning, leadership, figuring out how to stand out. Lectures are a good vehicle for putting out there that one thing that you wanna be known for, that you wanna be great at.

I'm Jack Cush with RheumNow. In this lecture we're going to talk about best practices in giving great lectures. Why do a lecture at all? Usually, it's because it's thrust upon you, unless you're someone like me who's always has his hand up saying, I'll do it. I'll do it.

My ideal gig is to go to some city, and when I get there, and when I get on stage, they say, you're going to lecture on cryoglobulinemia. I'm ready to go. Because I think I know how to lecture. I probably have given the lecture before, but you need to do this a lot to have that kind of confidence. One reason to do this is because it's your best opportunity to have you and your ideas valued by others.

Another way of looking at this is any presentation that you're asked to give isn't worth giving unless the objective is to seek change. Otherwise, it's waste of time and energy. And there's a lot of energy that goes into a lecture. Hours, many hours in fact. Before you start any lecture, you've got to ask two questions.

Who'll be changed by this lecture? What's the change I want to make with my audience? A few things: number one: change matters more than anything. Change matters more than data. Change matters more than sometimes the summary statement of the authors.

It's change. Remember, no one remembers the data. Everybody remembers the story. That's a line from Seth Godin. So I saw a great lecture on YouTube recently.

It's from professor Patrick Henry Winston, who was a professor of, I think, computer science, information science at MIT. He passed away in 2019 and he gave this lecture, a one hour lecture, on 50 things fifty years of learning how to give a great lecture. It's just chock full of good information. It's a one hour lecture. You might want to look at it on YouTube.

Patrick Henry Winston. Here are his tenets: start with a promise to your audience. When you get to the topic, cycle on it. Present it, re present it, present it again in a different way. Show them the data, tell them the story, give them the principle.

It's three sixty learning. They're going to get it if you cycle on the big point. He's a proponent of not having a title slide. Start with your data, your point, whatever, and maybe your title is the last thing you show either at the top of the page or at the bottom page as a summary banner. What?

He liked to talk about verbal punctuation, delivering information by enumerating. Here's six reasons why you should go to the state fair. One, two, three. Bullets. Use big arrows.

I wanna put my version of verbal punctuation in there, and that is the pause. Everybody's in such a rush to get their information out. You forget to use the pause. My greatest instructor in medical school was an anatomist who knew the art of the pause better than anyone. He was slow and deliberate in the lines that he delivered, and when he built up to the big point, he built it up verbally and with physical language, and then he would turn and pause.

And when he did, he better write down what he said, because it was going to be on the test. You should use questions or polling. It's a great way to engage the audience. Engage the audience in any way you can. What's the best time for a lecture?

Eleven a. M. Obviously not early early when everyone's showing up late and sleeping, not after lunch, not late in the day. The place is really important. Know the stage, Go to it ahead of time.

Figure out the room, the controls, where the audience is going to be, how you use the microphone, the pointer. Get the lighting, sound, and camera correct, if that's what you're doing. He made a big deal about chalk talks versus PowerPoint talks. Chalk talks are way better. The graphic delivery is more effective.

It's more dynamic, and it's given at the right speed, and the speed at which you write on the board is at the speed at which they learn, and there's a big reveal to it. I'm gonna tell you why PowerPoints are no good in my in in a second. What's the best font if you're using PowerPoints? 50 or 40 times font. That's big!

That basically means seven lines per slide. Oh, we're going talk about the seven by seven rule. He suggests using one graphic or one image per slide. It connects the audience to your point, your data, whatever. Your goal is to inspire and change the minds of those that you're teaching.

Why is PowerPoint a problem? Information overload. He was asked, this is, professor Winston, by a young faculty, could you review my slides? And he said, yes. You've got too many slides and too many words without ever looking at the slides.

And that's true. Everybody's got too many slides and too much text. The seven by seven rule is no more than seven lines on a slide, no more than seven words on each line. And then throw in that one image, you might only be able to put do it six by six or four by four. Second problem with bullet points.

We overuse them, we indiscriminately use them, we list things thinking that's a better way of teaching when it clearly is not. Using PowerPoint as a teleprompter, meaning reading your own slides. Well, they should have stayed home and read your slides rather than listen to you read your slides. The next big mistake most people make is problems in the design of the slide, the visuals, the fonts you use, the colors you use, the contrast you use, the template you use. Most people are pretty bad.

Me, I've got a very colorful imagination and I drive people crazy with my slides unless I'm trying to be really good at it, and then I choose a very flat background. It's like when you're doing a video. You don't want to do a video in front of a room full of tchotchkes and your your hobbies and your favorite books. You know, this video is being done in my podcast studio with a flat blue background, and that's for a reason. Lastly, including irrelevant content, and then lastly and then all more importantly, PowerPoints sort of make you neglect the audience.

You're looking at the PowerPoint the whole time instead of looking at the audience. These are big issues because the average attention span of the audience member is definitely less than twenty minutes. It's probably less than ten minutes for most. And when you poll people on what they remember from lectures, they're only going to remember three or four points at best. So, when teachers have been asked, why do you lecture?

They say things like, I get to clarify the complex because I can do it. Or they say, I wanna teach people how to think. Another way of saying that is I wanna change thinking with my education. But the other one is inspire. When you inspire, you're gonna be a good teacher.

They're gonna remember you and the words and points that you made. What inspires? When you can teach someone how to do something new. When you can show them a new way of approaching a problem. When you show them your passion on an issue, a topic.

And the other way to inspire is through educational momentum. What do I mean by that? You deliver content and knowledge that has a built in reward to it, which means that now they're interested in listening to you because the next thing you may say has got maybe more rewards. Right? And that builds momentum, and that builds motivation to learning and sticking with your content.

There are lot of different kinds of lectures you may give. There's the job interview talk, there's a topic update to your peers. Could you be the expert? What about if you're a key opinion leader, a KOL lecturing at a big meeting? Well, you are the expert, are you not?

Grand rounds is when things get serious. This is when you get to shine about what you want to be known for, and you better be good because this is your grand rounds. For me, the best lecture, I think, is when no one shows up and it's a table talk of me and three, four, no more than eight people, and it's less than thirty minutes, and I'm not showing any slides. It's a conversation. It's peer to peer.

Let's talk about the job interview talk and the objectives. When you're doing one of those, you have to quickly, in the first ten minutes, impart several things on the audience. One, your knowledge. Two, your vision. Three, your perspective.

And four, your accomplishments. You've got to get that across really quick. If you leave all that stuff to the end of a fifty minute presentation, they all tuned out. You lost them all. Let's talk about some do's and don'ts.

Practice practice practice. That's how you get to Carnegie Hall. Face the audience. Avoid the podium. Keep the lights on.

Tell everybody to turn off their cell phones and close their laptops, because now they're all going to focus on you, and they're not going to distract everyone else in the room. Put your body as close as possible to the screen. The wrong setup is when you're on the left side of the stage and the screen is on the right side of the stage and you're separated by 60 feet. Be as close as possible. Use your hands.

Use your hands to target your objective and teaching points. Use props. Props are really great diversions they have great teaching value. When I'm teaching on how to do a joint exam, I bring a bag full of grapes and a bag full of walnuts. The walnuts are when you squeeze in on squeezing on a DIP and PIP of an OA joint.

The grapes plump synovitis. You could do the same with a tomato, I should say. What about when you're trying to teach how hard to squeeze? Well, you want to build an image, either visually or with a prop. One image is that it needs to be when you're examining a joint to elicit synovitis, to elicit pain, it's one to four kilograms per square inch.

That's enough to blanch a fingernail. That's enough to say ouch when they have a tender point. My grandfather went to a pulmonologist once who was trying to explain to him why his lungs were going down the toilet, why they were so bad, And he took out his handkerchief and he folded it in half, and then in a quarter, and then into an eighth, and he showed him: Grandpa, this is what your lung is. It's no longer the size of that handkerchief, it's now the size of this little small napkin. It's a great visual.

Using those to explain your points go that's what everyone's going to remember. No one's going to remember that big histogram or that table that had nine rows and three columns, okay? Present your information logically, simply, and in order, or prioritize. Change the cadence. Build to a point and then take a mental break.

Tell a joke, do a diversion, then build to another point. Cadence and rhythm, highs and lows, are really important, especially if you're talking more than twenty minutes. I would say put your abstract notes in the speaker notes section of your PowerPoint, that way people can read more information, and end your presentation with handouts or written summaries. Don't make them available before, because they'll be looking at your stuff instead of looking at you. Your lectures, everyone should look at you, this is all about you.

And that is what will make you great. Things that you don't want to do: showing up unprepared, showing up with too many slides, putting your hands in your pockets, looking up or looking nowhere, people who are podium leaners and podium drivers. You know what I'm talking about. Don't use the electronic pointer enough to give people a seizure disorder. Don't try to be funny when you're not known to be funny.

Don't read the slides. Don't talk politics, religion, gender or race if it's not germane to the point of your talk. Don't have the compunction to tell everybody everything you know. I know so much about Still's disease. I can lecture you for three hours.

Nobody wants to hear me talk for three hours about a disease they're only gonna see one case of per year. Deliver only as much as you need to. I'm gonna tell you about the 90% kiss rule. Don't spar with an audience member or an adversary in the audience. Be respectful of them saying, I like your perspective.

It's different than mine. Tell me more about it. And then talk pros and cons, but be respectful. End your lecture with no time for questions, shame on you, and not giving handouts. They'll shame you for certain in your reviews.

Five ways to make a presentation better. Make it shorter. You don't get extra points for filling the one hour talk with fifty eight minutes of content. Be really clear about what this lecture is about, and who or what it will change. Don't use slides as a teleprompter.

Don't use too many bullets. No jokes, no shtick, no promotion. Be in the here and now. Again, your content should all be about you. It should be better with you present, with your energy, your passion, your humanity.

Never hide from that which you are teaching. So a few things on ways to get started. Actually, before we do that, let's talk about what are the best lectures. The best lectures, I think, are TED Talks. And are the TED Talks great because they have great presenters, or they're short presentations done by highly knowledgeable, highly passionate people who practice practice practice?

You know, the line is, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter that comes from Mark Twain. Meaning, the shorter the talk, the harder it is to do. TED Talks are successful because they have this 18 rule, and usually it's less than fifteen minutes for these talks or mini lectures. The speaker has passion on the subject. It's all about one idea that's worth spreading.

So let's just say you're gonna you're giving an hour lecture. Well, that's really forty five, fifty minutes. You really got three ideas that are worth spreading. Any more than that is overly aggressive. TED Talks are great because it's storytelling and not data transmission.

Storytelling so that you can inspire, help people to rethink or to transform their thinking. There's a theater effect to to TED, meaning they're not holding on to a podium. They're walking about. They're making the pregnant pause, the the strategic turns to the audience. They have the lights on them.

There's no slides necessary, or if they use slides, they'll use three or four slides as an accent to the point you're making verbally. There's a lot of emotional vulnerability in TED Talks that make them great. Why can't you give that when you're talking about, you know, six reasons to go to the state fair? Be creative. Go beyond the usual.

So when you're getting started, you have to know your audience, you have to know how much time you have, because that will dictate how many objectives you'll have, and that will dictate how many slides to have. There is this rule about no more than was it one slide per minute? It really should be like one slide per five minutes if you're doing this right. Know your topic, but then find a great title. Now don't mislead, but find a great title.

Start with the end in mind. Know how you're what your prime objective is, what's your big point, know how you're going to end, and then reverse engineer your talk. What does the audience need? What does the audience expect? It might be a good idea to start with a teaser, something where you tell them what you're going to show them in the end, and let then you can connect the dots along the way.

Again, the purpose of your talk is to be better than a good read or a chat GPT search on this topic. So you should begin by scratching it out on paper, on a napkin, on a receipt, and carry those around with you and keep adding to this in analog mode. You can use paper, whiteboards, whatever you like to use. Then when you think you have an outline of sorts, an objective, how you're going to end, what you're going to cover in the middle, then go to PowerPoint or Keynote if you're an Apple person, and start to lay it out. One slide per key point.

Use visuals to enhance your point. Include stories, cases, vignettes, personal stories, or a challenge. But when you're done, when you're finished with your 43 slides, then you have to edit yourself. Cut your slides in half. That's right.

Get rid of 50% of them. And the ones that you keep, cut the text in half. Get rid of 50% of the text. Now you've got a good slide deck. Now you can practice and awe the the audience.

So some advice on teaching less is more. Let thy speech be short, meaning fewer words leads to better comprehension. Go with the seven by seven rule at the most. That's seven lines per slide, seven words per line. This is the same as the t shirt rule, meaning I should be able to look at a t shirt from afar and understand the message.

The same should be said for your slides. I shouldn't need to magnify it and blow it up. The presentation has got to be more than the facts. Keep it simple Sammy, the kiss principle. Go with the unexpected.

Tap into emotions. Instead of saying I have more slides and data than I have time for, so I'm gonna have to go quickly through this, You should say, my slides and teaching points are going to be very few. Put on your seat belts, put up your tray tables, let's fly. I have two quotes from William Arthur Ward on teaching. He was an inspirational speaker.

A number of good quotes, I must say. Number one: we can learn much from wise words, little from wise cracks, and less from wise guys. But that seems to apply to me. Next, the mediocre teacher tells, the good teacher explains, the superior teacher demonstrates, and the great teacher inspires. I like that a lot.

So, when it comes to your slides, why should you use polling questions? Why should you use cases? One, it's a mental break, and it draws people in. Two, you can establish relevance. And in a case, you can reveal new knowledge or even a surprise that might change the direction of your talk.

What about polling questions? It'll help you to define what the audience knows, which may help you in clarifying issues and knowing what questions you may be getting. It'll help you to launch maybe the next teaching point in your slide deck, and it'll let them let the audience know where they stand about what they know and what they don't know. Okay? It's all about the audience.

It's not about you. That's a hard thing to learn as a teacher. You know, usually you think it's all about you, your knowledge, your superior teaching skills. You gotta make it all about the audience. Then you are the best teacher because they wanna be engaged.

What they don't want and what they don't need is all your knowledge, your gigantic data dump on this topic that they came to hear about. Maybe you should approach lecturing from the way people approach writing books or making movies. Tease in the beginning. Get them interested. Structure your content so there's a first act, the setup.

A second act, the conflict. The third act, the resolution or lesson. A beginning, middle, and end. A thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. A backstory, context, conflict, problem, and challenges, and resolution, the big takeaways.

I like stop them, sell them, and then hit them or shoot them. What? Hit them? Shoot them? What am I talking about?

In the beginning of my lecture, I like to load a gun, put it in a drawer. That makes no sense unless I'm gonna pull it out at the end and fire the thing. Hit them. Hit them with the big lesson, the big message. The first 25% of your movie, I mean lecture, you're gonna establish the need, the problem, the challenge.

The next 50% of your content, you're gonna build the story, offer the pros and the cons. Where is the tension, conflict and consequences of what we're talking about? And then the last 25% you give the pivotal information, the big reveal, the big truth. Give perspective to the learners. What's this about?

The 90% kiss comes from that movie Hitch. And the idea is when you're gonna kiss someone, you don't go fully in for the kiss, you go 90% of the way, so that the other person will go the other 10%. They'll engage. They'll want more. They'll fight with you.

They'll love you. They'll ask you questions. What's going on here? Don't cover everything because they don't wanna know everything. And when you leave stuff out, you're now driving them crazy.

Now they're gonna get up at the microphone and say, hey, why didn't you talk about the the Ferris wheel at the state fair? It's the biggest thing for goodness sakes. And then you're all set up. They're gonna complete the rest of the talk that you didn't show them. What is a really bad lecture?

The worst lecture is one that rambles. It's coming from a person who is shooting from the hip, clearly not seasoned, it's BS right from the start right to the end. The person who uses too many anecdotes, especially if they have no purpose or point. The gal or guy who reads slides, has too many slides, has too many words or lines on slides. When I'm teaching, I like to use this term 'notalgia' for a certain disease.

'Notalgia' is when the patient brings in so many notes and documents that the doctor hurts. That's notalgia. It applies to slides. You got too much stuff on there, that's notalgia for the audience. And then the worst lectures have no setup, no payoff, no resolution.

How do you end your lectures? Professor Winston said don't end with a thank you. You're wasting time wasting space. He says, end with a joke, because if it's a good joke, everyone's gonna think they spent the last hour having fun. Not a bad idea.

End with a story, especially if it's on point, inspirational, and hammers home what you've taught. Go to the big picture, encapsulate, reframe, or come full circle, or get that gun out of the drawer and shoot it at someone. Leave them with a call to action, your vision, their commitment, your commitment. What's the inspiration? Don't be afraid to end with something all about you.

This should be all about you. Why not all about you? And if you don't know what to say, salute the audience, say God bless you and God bless rheumatology. Don't end with a conclusion. You already did that four slides ago.

There's no need to do acknowledgments. If there is a need to do acknowledgments, make it your third slide, not your forty ninth slide. And don't end with a slide that says questions, question mark, or the end in quotations, or a URL address that no one's gonna write down and no one's going to go to. I'll finish with two, great quotes. Be so good they can't ignore you.

That comes from the comedian Steve Martin. And doctor Winston said, at the end of your lecture, you're either gonna be famous or ignored. What you do in the construct of your lecture will determine whether you'll be famous or ignored. Tune in next week.