Using Teaching Tools in a Research Talk

Hi, my name is Ross Boltyanskiy, I am a PhD student in physics and a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center.  This is my first blog post ever!  Here we go...

In a way, I feel like I'm "the teaching guy" in my lab and I am often told that no matter what I do, it sounds like I'm teaching.  Some of you may have had similar experiences.  While normally that's not always a compliment, to my ears it often is.  I think this attitude stems from a desire in teaching enthusiasts to share a bit of knowledge, a bit of understanding, and a bit of appreciation with our audience, whoever the audience is.  I have especially enjoyed incorporating elements of teaching in my research talks.  Here I'll mention a few practices I learned from pedagogy that I think make presentations both more effective and more enjoyable.  What follows are mostly my opinions bolstered by some feedback, not proven theorems!  I will categorize these opinions into four very fundamental concepts we think about when teaching a class.

I. Prior knowledge

This is one of the most important aspects of giving a talk: know your audience!  One may say that the audience in a research talk is just researchers, right?  While true, it's similar to saying that the audience in a class is just students.  We usually appreciate that students are different - they have varying levels of preparation, different interests, and different expectations.  Understanding this is perhaps even more important in preparing to give a talk.  Here are a few aspects of our audience that are particularly important to keep in mind:

(a)  Background & Expertise 
My field is biophysics and I'm always thinking about my audience's mathematical background and area of expertise.  Are they mainly biologists? Are they physicists?  Engineers?  Are they mathematically inclined?  The answer to each of those questions should significantly affect the talk.  Given their area of expertise, what kind of language are they used to?  It might be very different from the language I'm used to in which case I have to work hard to adjust.  I imagine the situation is similar in other sciences, in the humanities, and social sciences although in some cases the differences in audience backgrounds might be more delicate.

(b)  Interests
It is comparably important to think of what piques the curiosity of your audience.  This question might take us back to the previous point of their area of expertise.  However, it's also worth thinking about what brings your audience together at the given meeting - is it a common topic, a common technique, a common approach?  With each group, it's essential to figure out what questions will motivate them.  Sometimes it's tough to acknowledge that those might not be the same questions that motivated you to pursue your project!  That's ok.  Our talks are geared at engaging our audience, so the focus should be on them.

(c)  Goals 
This one I find a bit tricky.  The audience might have an agenda in being present at the meeting. They might be eager to learn about a cutting edge technique, they might want to adapt aspects of your research in their projects, or they might just be there for entertainment.  I think it's important to think about their goals in order to best engage them.  Having said that, we should not sacrifice our goals for theirs.  We should have an agenda as well - perhaps it's getting feedback about our work, perhaps it's getting ideas about future research, or maybe it's spreading the word about our awesomeness.  In any case, our goals should be prioritized and kept in mind.

(d)  Context
The level of formality of the talk is an important knob to adjust. Giving an informal talk at a formal meeting is unprofessional. Giving a formal talk at an informal meeting is often an ineffective way to resonate with the group and get feedback.  Formality is a fun degree of freedom to explore, there is lots of room to play here as long as we are thoughtful about it.

I'm sure there are other relevant categories, but I hope you get the idea.  With this perspective, one should never give two identical talks!  It's more work this way, but it's more effective and much more interesting.   

II.  Active Learning

I remember thinking that active learning is not relevant to talks since talks are most passive lectures.  While talks are mainly lectures (and we may not be able to really change that), they don't have to be passive.  Lecture can be very active and engaging.  Here are a few tips I learned form teaching that I try to adapt to my talks.

(a)  Pausing
This may seem trivial, but please pause in your talk for your listeners to think!  In a class, this is my favorite type of active learning.  It's the easiest, most risk-free one to employ and overall I believe it can make the biggest difference.  When we make an important statement, let's pause for significantly longer than it would take us to internalize the point.  This is not because our typical audience is less intelligent, but because they haven't thought about our point before.  Pausing for longer also allows them to think of the ways the point you made does not make sense thus offering an opportunity to ask questions.  I put "pausing" in the category of active learning because it can force the audience to think, to integrate knowledge, and to look for gaps in understanding.  It gets them engaged.  As a ball-park value I recommend trying to pause for 5-7 seconds.  This may seem short, but it can feel like hours on stage.

(b)  Asking questions... AND pausing
This is my second favorite type of active learning.  Asking question can be an amazing way to both motivate the audience and to channel their thinking.  This practice only belongs in the active learning category, however, if you leave enough time for actual engagement.  Next time when you want to make a strong point in a talk, consider asking the question first, leaving the listener a bit puzzled, perhaps in a contradiction, and leave him/her with a opening that you will soon fill with the answer.  This is often a much more effective way to get the point across. 
Now let me ask you something: suppose you pose a question that has a relatively accessible answer that someone in the audience may know, should you wait for an answer?  I'm pausing here for you to consider this...  Think about it for 5 seconds.  Now comes my answer: I think it very much depends on the context of your talk.  If it's a large research meeting where it's too scary to answer, don't wait for the answer.  In that case, it's enough to leave time for each person to answer the question for himself/herself.  If it's a smaller, less formal meeting, it might make sense to really wait enough time for someone to answer.  This can takes minutes!  Please be ready to persevere the awkwardness that may ensue...

(c)  Soliciting the audience to interpret, analyze, predict, and make suggestions
In a smaller, less formal setting such as group meeting, journal club, or a discussion group, I've had a lot fun trying out different kinds of active learning.  Here I'll mention a few anecdotes of things I've tried that I found effective.  Please consider these merely as examples of ways to experiment.  I made them specific only for illustration purpose.  I do apologize, these examples are exclusively from science, but I think many have accessible analogues in the humanities and social sciences.

• Asking to observe & hypothesize.  For two years I was using a movie of a bacterium interacting with an immune cell as motivation for my talk. After showing the movie, I would explain what I found interesting or unusual about it and what I think a good physical model for the interaction is.  Essentially no one has ever stopped me to mention any other observations or ideas.  Finally, I decided to try something new - I showed the movie and asked members of my group what they thought was happening and what they thought was interesting.  It generated an exhilarating discussion with 7 or 8 ideas of what could be going on and with hypotheses that I never thought about.  They noticed aspects of the movie I never noticed!  It was fascinating.  If you have a provocative, interesting piece of data, I strongly encourage you to ask your audience to analyze it and think about it first.  It will get them engaged and invested in learning about the problem in addition to possibly generating ideas for you.  Your audience will probably not volunteer their analysis right away just because so few people try this in a talk, but eventually ideas should start flowing.

• Asking to brainstorm.  I had a problem of a material failure (cracking) that I could not explain.  I showed the cracks, described the setting under which it was happening and asked my group to help me identify the possible factors that could cause this.  On my own I may have come up with 4 factors, together we came up with maybe 6.  I thought this was very good not only because I got 2 more ideas to try, but also because my group was totally with me when I explained my experiments with regard to the other 4.  Following that discussion, I also asked my group to suggest solutions to this problem. This question didn't produce much during the meeting, but one lab mate followed up with a thought afterwards. At least I knew my group was engaged.

• Asking to analyze.  I was preparing a paper and wanted to present a draft of the abstract and the figures in a small discussion group.  At first I thought I will read the abstract so that the audience knows what the paper is about and then go right to the figures to defend the claims in the abstract. Upon second thought, I decided to ask the group members to read my abstract first and tell me what they think this paper is about.  It worked beautifully.  The group brought up points I intended to be in abstract, points that were misleading as well points that were not emphasized enough.  All of these were both useful for me and prepared the audience for the figures I was about to show.

• Asking to predict.  Several times in different meetings, I have shown a piece of initial data and asked my audience to predict what the rest of the data show (especially data following a perturbation).  I found this useful in a few ways: (a) sometimes they would predict the right outcome which would confirm that it's expect, (b) sometimes they would predict the wrong outcome, often for good reason, which can suggest possible phenomena to be ruled out, (c) sometimes this prompted a question admitting that something earlier on didn't make sense and there is confusion about what to expect. All of these could be very useful.  In all cases, it's essential for the speaker to leave enough time for someone to muster up the courage to say something.  That time is often longer than we would think.

• Asking to interpret.  Once in a while I like to show a full plot and ask my group members what they think this means.  What are the implications?  What could be an underlying mechanism?  Sometimes I do that because I don't know what the answer is.  Sometimes I do it because I want to hear if there are suggestions other than what I thought of.  In any case, I found that it can draw the audience in and can provide useful feedback.

Above are just a few examples in a few categories.  There are so many other ways to try it.  Please experiment!

III.  Diversity of Learners

I'll try to make this section short.  Just as in a class, it's important to be aware that our audience, despite all being researchers even in a narrow field, may pick up information in different ways.  There are many, many ways to characterize learning styles.  Someone should probably write a blog post on that... I'll just mention the simplest, most overused one described here and will point out a few tips I learned about how these apply to talks.

(a)  Visuals 
Clear, simple visuals are a must, at least in science talks.  Cartoons and schematic are extremely helpful!

(b)  Aural/Speech 
Both in lesson plans and in talks, it helps me to memorize basically two things which I'll mention here.  I don't memorize the entire talk although some people do find the need to do that - it depends on the speaker.  I memorize the following:  (1) The introduction: the first two or three sentences are crucial and I tend to think about those a lot.  They should be enticing, they could be bold, could be funny, could be provocative - that too depends much on what the speaker is comfortable with and what the context of the meeting is.  (2) Transitions between points or slides.  Those are essential for a coherent story.  I like transitioning with a question that the next point or slide addresses, that's my preference.

(c)  Read/Write/Text 
Most often I think we err on the side of too much text on our slides, so less wordy is probably my main suggestion (someone must be thinking the same of this blog post...).  Having said that, I strongly encourage having key points written on the slide for those who really pick up by reading and not listening.  I learned a wonderful tip from my adviser to put the main point of the slide or the main question the slide addresses right in the title.  For example a title can look something like: "Protein X misfolding causes disease Y" or "How does the concentration of X affect the dynamics of Y." Short sentences and large font usually work very well. 

(d) Kinesthetic
I'll mention three ideas here: (1) If you bring a toy to your talk, you are already a rock star.  (2) If you bring a toy for everyone in the audience to play with, you are a hero.  A wonderful example of this was a physicist I recently saw give a talk about protein filaments in a cell.  She gave everyone twizzlers to help us discover some properties of twisted filaments.  It was beautiful!  (3) If you have a cool movie, play it and replay it.  Make sure to tell your audience what the movie is showing and it can be a great way to engage and entertain your group.
  
The main point here is that, just as in a class, it's often worthwhile to communicate our ideas in as diverse set of ways as possible.

IV.  Feedback

I'll try to make this section really short.

Getting feedback from research talks is often difficult.  Sometime we can gauge at how the audience interacts with us and what they are doing as we speak, but those cues I find harder to pick up on in a talk than in a class.  Sometimes being sensitive to what questions people ask can point to a focus of the talk that we either intended or did not intend to have.  To get more of those I encourage my audience to ask questions, give comments, and provide suggestions from the very start. 

If you don't get explicit feedback, I'd ask for it.  I often ask my lab mates, friends, and mentors to tell me what they thought the talk did well and push them to tell me how it could be better.  Tell them ahead of time that you are interested in feedback and ask them to observe your talk.  I'm lucky to have a very helpful group and adviser who often give great feedback in practice talks too.  Try to give a practice talk if you can and try to do it as early as possible.  I'm always impressed with the number revision I end up making after practicing...

Being on the topic of getting feedback, I want to encourage everyone to give (especially positive) feedback to the speaker.  If you find the speaker did something well, let him or her know!  It makes a world of difference especially for those of us who are still learning how to give a good talk.

In summary:

I.       Learn as much as you can about your audience before your talk.
II.      Try to engage your audience's thinking as much as possible.
III.     Keep in mind the diversity of your group and try to reach as many of the members as you can.
IV.     Find out if the things you tried in your talk were effective!


Final comment: This may be a bit off topic, but I want to make a suggestion about public speaking.  I am certainly no master at this, but I came across an interesting method I'm experimenting with.  I always get a rush of excitement that often comes along with fear before delivering a talk or teaching a class.  I'd like to keep the excitement but lose the fear.  One tip I learned (interestingly, from an ancient Jewish source) is thinking about helping your audience or your students right before you start.  Our anxiety often comes from being too focused on ourselves, too self-centered, too self-conscious.   Instead, try thinking about giving your audience a chance to learn something cool, appreciate something new, find out something useful.  Focusing on giving to them can be very inspiring.  Give it a try!

I hope this post is helpful in building bridges between teaching and giving talks.  I think there is naturally so much in common between the two.  If you agree or disagree with anything I wrote, please comment!  I'd love to hear your thoughts and I would love to have a chance to learn from you.  Thank you!