Last week I attended a teaching conference hosted by @BarbiHoneycutt - so many vital pieces of training, but I want to post a thread about not fearing emotions in your presentation. (Heads up @travesty328 - this is for my badge)

Writers know that emotion is a vital hook for attention. You can have a great plot and world-building but if readers don’t emotionally bond with it, all your work is for naught.

When I became a teacher, my mom gave me her best advice “No one will care how much you know until they know how much you care.” I teach medical care for dietitians, so I thought about how I could help my students realize the importance of compassion.

The answer came from my writing toolkit - storytelling. But a story comes at a cost. A good story takes time, pacing, humor, practice and connection. The right story has to come at the precise right time, too. It’s a refining tool. But there’s a cost to time and comfort.

Traditional lectures rely on data dumping. It’s comforting - as professors we are supposed to be experts. What’s more “expert” than 45 minutes of us telling what we know? Storytelling and emotional hooks disrupt that. There’s a risk to it. No guarantees it will work.

(When I started, I was too entertaining, so that’s also a risk.) Not everyone is a good storyteller, but there is a story for everything. If you don’t tell stories well, find a video that does so. I think the sweet spot is 3-4 minutes of content.

Vary the story placement in your lectures, too. Some stories will benefit from pre-teaching. Some will make teaching more effective.

The other mistake I see academics make is the assumption that all emotion is a form of bias. While that can be true, students need us to demonstrate how emotion works to make us BETTER at using information and making decisions.

That means being comfortable with your own emotions and the wide range. Curiosity, compassion, worry, outrage, amusement, humor - every emotion is a tool that can enhance your teaching (though please don’t use all of them all the time - unless you have a therapist on-call)

So look at your lectures and ask yourself what you can do to bring a few emotions into it. Can you tell a story? Present a problem to spur curiosity? Help students feel pride in their accomplishments? What emotions can you use to connect content to emotional memory?

In one of my writing classes, the teacher reminded us that emotion is the most powerful form of memory. Our goal as educators is to install info that will last a lifetime. We can’t do that without adding a dash of emotion.

I said before that 3-4 minutes is a story sweet spot. So aim for that - just 4 minutes of emotionally-impactful content. See what it can do for your lectures (and those student evaluations)
#lecturebreakers