last article<\/a>, the point is not for this to be a comprehensive guide to be followed when preparing a seminar, but rather an aid in watching out for the common pitfalls. Be patient with yourself when facilitating a seminar. During your actual seminar, you will most likely find things that did not go as well as you hoped. Don\u2019t beat yourself up over it, but like you would at an event, make sure to remember and learn from it.<\/p>\nBeing approachable<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>
\nThe first of these common mistakes is an important one and one that bleeds into most of the others. This is about the presenter that is so occupied with thinking, they lose the ability to improvise and adapt. If your mind is somewhere else, whether you are thinking about the next slide, your posture or what\u2019s for lunch, you won\u2019t be able to nuance your points or consider how you can work a participant\u2019s question into your presentation smoothly. Pay attention to how the participants are reacting to what you\u2019re saying. If someone looks confused or seems like they are disagreeing, ask them about it.<\/p>\n
There are several things that can cause you to adapt your seminar\u2019s direction, such as the energy of the crowd, how well they seem to grasp the topic or their opinions on the matter. The point here is not to list them all, but to highlight the fact that if you are too focused on other things, you\u2019ll have a hard time noticing anything at all. If you are focusing on your performance, your tools or your notes, you cannot focus on the reason for your seminar – the other participants.<\/p>\n
Handling Questions<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>
\nQuestions are tricky. People asking questions during a presentation can disrupt your train of thought, they can make you go off on tangents that eat up your time and they can steal the points you have planned to make on your next slide. This is downright disruptive if you have a more strict speech prepared, but can be hard to handle smoothly even if that\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n
Decide in advance how you want to handle questions. It\u2019s absolutely fine to ask your participants to hold off questions to specific points during the seminar where they will not risk derailing the discussion or presentation. It might even be recommended, as it allows you to better manage your time (e.g. by setting off a specific window of time for questions at certain points of your seminar) and not be nervous about getting questions that might interrupt in the middle of an explanation.<\/p>\n
Another important part of being able to handle questions well is preparing for the questions that might come up. Once you\u2019re happy with your plan for the seminar, try to go through it and at every point you\u2019re making, think about what could be asked by participants – both experienced and inexperienced ones. Write those questions down. This doesn\u2019t just mean you\u2019re prepared to answer those questions clearly and effectively, it also lets you ask yourself a crucial question in advance: Why isn\u2019t your seminar already answering those questions? You might notice issues you didn\u2019t realize were there, or see how you could explain basics or concepts more clearly to begin with.<\/p>\n
Keeping on Schedule<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>
\nIf you\u2019ve been to a couple of conferences, you\u2019ve probably seen seminars with time management issues. That one seminar that just drags on, the facilitator getting more and more stressed as the participants start glancing at their watches, shifting in their seats and focus less and less on the actual topic. You probably can\u2019t help but feel both empathy for the poor stressed out facilitator and annoyance about the fact that they are costing you your coffee break.<\/p>\n
Making mistakes with time management feels really bad. It can destroy all the excellent preparation you\u2019ve done for your seminar, force you to rush parts you\u2019d rather explain more clearly and or skip some parts entirely. This is especially rough as it is so easily avoided. By simply doing practice runs of your seminar, using a timer, you get an idea of how long it takes and allow you to set up checkpoints that will help you keep track of how far along you ought to have come as a certain part of the seminar is done. If you have a 45 minute time slot, you should plan for your seminar to take 30-35 minutes. It gives you some leeway to allow the participants to ask questions and lets you expand upon an explanation if you feel the need to do so.<\/p>\n
Wrapping Up<\/b><\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
This is part of planning your time properly. Make sure you have a strong ending, summing up the points you and the other participants made, and leaving everyone wanting more. Repeating the main points does a lot for the retention of the participants, and gives everyone time to think about everything that was brought up one last time. Spend at least five minutes to sum everything up yourself, and then leave about ten or fifteen minutes for questions and a final discussion. If you have a slide for this final part, this might be the point where you can actually add a bit more text to the slide. Having a slide that sums everything up is helpful for the participants and reminds them of the questions they might have thought of during the seminar.<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
In the end, making great seminars won\u2019t happen overnight. It takes practice and preparation to really get the hang of it and even then, there are a lot of ways to improve or add variation to your seminars. This is a pretty basic look at some of the things that you\u2019d want to keep in mind, but with that said, don\u2019t stress out over it too much. The best way to get into it is just trying it out. Your first seminar doesn\u2019t have to be the best ever.<\/p>\n
Going forward, more articles are coming up, addressing the finer points of seminars and going into more detail about the different parts of seminars and conferences written by some of the finest facilitators in the judge program. Don\u2019t miss out on those.
\nIf you\u2019re interested in facilitating\u00a0a seminar, talk to your RC about taking on a seminar at your next regional conference and don\u2019t be afraid to ask for advice from the people you\u2019ve seen do seminars at the conferences you\u2019ve been to. There are a lot of judges that are always willing to be helpful, so don\u2019t hesitate to ask for ideas and feedback. Good luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
See previous part here As the facilitator hushes the discussion and start summing up the main points of the seminar, you realize your assigned seminar slot is next. You glance over your notes a final time to make sure they are in the proper order, your mind gradually filtering out anything that\u2019s going on up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,10],"tags":[],"language":[13],"class_list":["post-274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-conference-presenters","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274\/revisions\/380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/conferences\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}