PRESENTER DEVELOPMENT SERIES #1

TRANSCRIPT

Good afternoon and thank you for being a part of this first Presenter Development Series webinar – Setting the stage for a successful presentation. Congratulations on having your proposal accepted.

My name is Ray Plaza, and I have the privilege of serving as the ACPA17 Program Chair. Before we officially start, I want to acknowledge the events of the past week and how they might be affecting and impacting the critical work on our campuses. Please know that ACPA is here to serve as a resource, and is looking at ways that the Convention can best support the community.

This new series is designed to better support and prepare presenters for the Convention. This portion complements the earlier webinar series focused on Program Development. The goal is to provide presenters an opportunity to ask questions as well as to focus on the valuable skill of presenting. For those of you that are new to the GoToMeeting platform – you will be muted and at different times, I will unmute and provide an opportunity for questions. Feel free to use the question box as well.

This webinar is being recorded and the slides and transcript will be made available on the ACPA17 convention website so that they can serve as a resource for you.

Today’s webinar is focused on setting the stage for your presentation this coming March 2017. This is more of a broad overview to address issues that have been raised in the past by prior convention attendees and to have you start thinking about your own preparation timelines and deadlines. As I mentioned earlier, this is a valuable opportunity to ask questions. In this past, this was merely done through a blog post, so we want to be more intentional over the course of our webinars.

As you review the webinar, you may notice different colors on the side and shapes on the corners. These correspond to particular focus areas and have been consistent throughout the webinar series. For example, the blue color bar is typically the introductory slides, also designated by a star, while the orange bars, are the main focus of the webinar, designated by a diamond.
How did we get here? We got here through the great work all of you and all the ACPA members; it was through your responses by the deadline of September 9th, we had a record number of submissions. The review process started on September 19th, and the reviews were completed by October 12th.

Notifications went out on October 24th and most of you have accepted your program acceptances on November 4th. We have an amazing slate of over 500 programs across the professional competencies and different topic areas. For those of you that are interested in data, 61% of all proposals were accepted, 12% were delineated as alternate, we have a much larger alternate pool than we’ve ever had, to address issues we’ve had in the past, and roughly 20% of our programs were not selected.

My question to all of you is, what does it mean to be an effective presenter? For those of you watching this, or hearing this, telecast, our original recording was lost so we had to re-record this, so I want to share some of the initial feedback we got from the original recording. One of the members talked about really the need for the abstract that delineates, that sees reflected in the presentation itself. Some were talking about as a presenter, making sure your vision comes across to your audience, and they can see that they’re inspired by that. Someone really talked about having that self-confidence as a presenter; also, being engaging with your audience as well. Those were some of the things that members shared in terms of what it could mean to be an effective presenter. So as we move forward and we think about the qualities of being a skillful presenter, we’ve come across different studies that have shown that they’ve identified 28 qualities that a good presenter exhibits but also embodies. Over the next few webinars, we will be reviewing all of these qualities in order to cover them, and what we’ve done now is really highlight the first six. We’ve given you the link there, Rich Maggiani has developed the list of 28 qualities, and we’re highlighting the first six. Here, for example, we have how we communicate nonverbally and verbally in the process – how does that come across to the audience? How animated are we, or in terms of, how excited are we? There’s definitely a difference when you go to a presentation where the presenter is much more energetic and lively, versus a presenter who is just reading off the slide, doesn’t have a lot of energy, is very lethargic. There is a difference there. How are you assertive, how do you command the room and ensure that you understand what’s taking place in that session? Obviously you don’t want to be overly aggressive or passive, but having a role to play there, and related to that is being very astute – noticing, being observant of what’s taking place. What is my audience feeling or doing? Are they understanding what I’m trying to say; I think those are very valuable pieces, along with being cheerful – optimistic, excited about your topic. The audience can pick up if this is not something you’re interested in, you’re not very confident in as well, so these are the other terms we’ll talk about later on, but we want to highlight on these first six that are very critical in this process.

Now that we’ve highlighted different qualities and skills, we want to set the stage, and what does that mean. It is important to understand your particular program type and how it fits into the broader system. This year, or if you’ve been to prior ACPA conventions, you’re going to notice a level of intentionality within the different programs blocks. Traditionally, you went to a program block that lasted around 60 minutes, but you had sessions of different lengths, so you had a session that was a 75 minute session, you’d be late and rushing to get to your next session. So what we’ve tried to do is group similar type sessions together in particular blocks. You may go to a 60 minute session block, and in that block you’re going to find general program sessions, spotlight sessions. You may go to a 75-minute session block and find research papers and competency based sessions. So our hope is that this level of intentionality will help us in moving forward. So as we think about your different program types, thinking about the general program session – that’s a 60 minute session – most of our sponsored and co-sponsored programs are as well, general session programs. Thinking about if you have a competency based session, what does that mean interms of 75 minute session, how does that look like? Some of you have extended sessions – these are 120 minute sessions, so 2 program blocks. These are more institute-feel, much more in-depth and require 2 hours. Then we have our spotlight sessions, so within a 60 minute block in a particular room, you’ll have 2 sessions on a related topic, each presenting for a half hour with a moderator persay, to ensure that we’re staying on task. Research papers, typically 3 papers on related topic are grouped together; each presenter will have roughly 20 minutes to discuss and then a discussant to facilitate a conversation. And then we have our research papers and practice posters – individuals will bring their posters to convention and will have designated areas where they will be able to showcase their work and engage attendees as well. So it’s very important that we think about our program type as we begin to finalize our presentation, and if you have a question about what your program type is, then feel free to reach out to the convention team.

As we begin to think about setting the stage, not only thinking about our program types, it is critical that we reflect on the abstract that we submitted. Why is this important? The abstract sets the stage for the presentation and explains to others the why behind your presentation. Those interested in attending your session will have read your abstract in the convention app. This is important because what we have found is the #1 dissatisfaction of convention attendees is when they attend a session and it does not align with the abstract that was written. That’s important. We recommend that you keep the abstract in the forefront of your planning and preparation. You have the opportunity to make changes, and we’ll talk about that in the next slide. Thinking about, if you were to make a change to your abstract, doing that sooner rather than later, but if you were to find that as you get closer to Convention that you have to make a change, that you are upfront with your audience and say, in the process of us finalizing, we realize we needed to go in a different direction, and we want all of you to be aware that if you were going to a session that was only focused on X. That way you’re clear and upfront with your audience.

As you think about setting the stage, really think about reviewing your proposal. Each of you as coordinating presenters have the opportunity to log in through the CDMS portal under the program submission side and review your submission. You’re welcome between now and January 1 to make any changes to the title, abstract, to add presenters, make any changes. This will be very important to re-read your proposal and incorporate any feedback as appropriate from the reviewers, and to make any final decisions on the content and delivery method. So one of the questions I’ve just seen here is when are we going to get this feedback? I can share that the feedback is going to be available the week of November 14th, if not later today and over the course of the next few days. If by the end of the week you have not received your feedback, please let us know, and if you have any questions about the feedback, then reach out to us as well. As we think about setting the stage with your abstract, your proposal, we want you to think about how you will engage your audience in the actual presentation. Last year, one of the biggest concerns that was expressed was the heavy usage of “pair and share”. For those of us that are introverts, “pair and share” can be problematic, especially when it’s overdone. Pair and share is when, as a presenter you say “please turn to the person sitting next to you and engage in a conversation and talk about something”. That’s what pair and share is, and I think what we heard is, it needs to be more. Explain why we are using this. How will this help us in the session? This will be the focus of our January 17 webinar, when we are looking at additional ways of engagement beyond just pair and share. It looks like in the questions here, someone shared that for example, if you do something with theory, the discussion could be about how does that theory imply how we use that, that could be one tool to engage the members in that application process as well. It looks like someone else mentioned that a great way to engage is to ask questions – rather than have a statement that ends in a period, make a statement that ends with a question mark. Engage your audience in this way. Now we have some time for some Q&A time, and just want to make sure that folks are aware, it looks like everyone is in agreement, but wanted to provide this opportunity.

I want to go ahead and shift gears a little bit; as we think about the abstract and these other piece, we really want to begin to look at how are sessions themselves practice inclusion and inclusive practices. It is important to understand that different pieces might influence how your program is perceived.

I do want to provide this caveat, is that we can’t tell you want to do; all we can do is provide guidance to assist you in this process. One of the key areas under inclusion is that of language, and in this particular case, the usage of gendered examples or pronouns. For example, instead of using “him/her”, using “they/their” to be much more inclusive and more non-binary. Recently, one of the ACPA entity groups in their award process used pronouns that were very binary-specific, and it caused a lot of issues because some members didn’t see themselves in that process. However, if you’re using concrete examples that require delineation of a specific gender identity or sexuality, then it is appropriate, but I think it’s being mindful about how we use examples and being more inclusive in that process.

Related to that is really thinking about the terminology associated around Columbus and the impact that is has on our Native communities. Thinking about avoiding words that are problematic – exploration, discovery, new world. While I suspect unintentional, these words could have a deteriorating effect on some of our colleagues and can really send the wrong message in terms of what you’re trying to portray. We’ve provided 2 different blog posts here, one by Dian Squire, the Equity and Inclusion liaison to the Governing Board, and Cindi Love, the Executive Director, that really provides different ways that we can better understand Columbus and the need to use inclusive language.

And then another one is language around ability, and I know that I’ve made that mistake in this webinar. It’s really thinking about how we use terminologies like “run, see, walk and stand”, and really being mindful of that. A recent experience I had, I was facilitating the training session and one of the individuals in the room was blind, and I didn’t realize that going in, and in the process, I used the terminology “blind studies”, and the individual called me out on that to be more clear and specific about what I meant, so that was a good learning reminder for me in terms of how we think about language and terminology.

So as we think about language we also want to think about how we ensure our presentations are accessible, and we think about Universal Design. This is going to be the main focus of our December webinar as we go much more in depth and detail. On the Presenter Resources page on the ACPA17 website, we have some recommended guidelines about Universal Design principles that you can use with your presentation. One of them, for example, is the whole usage of PowerPoint vs. Prezi. We know that each comes with different challenges and risks – just something to consider in regards to that.