Instructor Credibility & Communications (Domain 3)

6. Utilizing Oral Communication Skills

How does this picture make you feel? maybe a little nervous. For a lot of people, standing in front of an audience and speaking is a very nerve wracking experience, and you'll have to do it quite a bit as a technical trainer. That's why we're going to talk about some oral communication skills, some that are going to make you feel more confident and also increase your abilities as a public speaker, which will again increase the quality of your training.

So don't be afraid of this microphone. Just step up and start speaking. First of all, breathing is important when you're speaking. Breathing comes from the diaphragm, not just the top of your chest but all the way down in your stomach. That enables you to project clearly and reach the back of the room. Even if you're using a microphone, you still have to project so that people in the back can hear you and that the words are coming out clearly. When you're speaking, push the air from your stomach, and that will make sure lots of air is coming through your vocal cords. And you're being very deliberate about your very deliberatDiction is done with the tip of the tongue and the teeth. It is the way you move your mouth when you speak. So make sure you open your mouth perhaps a little wider than normal.

Use your tongue, lips, and teeth to speak. And you slightly overpronounce when you're public speaking. So because there's distance between you and the speaker, because you are speaking over the natural noise of the room and perhaps others that might be speaking at the same time, you do need to get familiar with overdoing it with your pronunciation a little bit, stopping just before sounding affected or unnatural. Your tone also needs to be more relaxed.

You can vary the pitch of your voice and the power of your voice—the volume. If you want to draw people in, you can speak a little slower and then use more power and volume. When you hit your main point and also the pace of your voice, you want to vary, sometimes speaking slowly and sometimes speaking quicker. It really adds some flavour to your delivery and keeps people from falling asleep when you're speaking. If you're too monotonous, don't speak above or below the audience. What I mean by that is, don't use a vocabulary or a style of speaking that is so elevated that your audience won't understand what you're saying. But also, don't speak down to them like their children either. Just try to strike the sweet spot based on the nature of your audience. Articulate clearly and be succinct. Don't use too many words. Once you've stated your point, move on.

If there are no questions, assume everyone understands and move on. Especially if you've already checked for understanding by means of some questions. Limit the number of times you might record yourself in front of a camera a couple of times to see how you're doing with that. Is it really distracting? Some are natural. But if you're doing it too much, then it's going to be very distracting to your audience. Naturalness means that you speak here like yourself. Don't try and put on a persona or act like somebody that you're not, but with consideration to some of the things that we've already spoken about, make sure that your speech is as close to your natural way of speaking as possible. Be conversational. You're not being arrogant. You're not just constantly talking about how awesome you are at technology or how awesome a teacher you are. all of your experience to try and somehow impress the audience.

It's not about that. You also don't have to be apologetic, like, "Oh, I'm so sorry, I don't know this very well." I'm so sorry if I said that wrong. No, don't strike that tone either. But just have a conversation with your audience, a professional business conversation, and they'll respond well to that. Eye contact is important to really look at your notes. I don't just speak from the notes or from the slide, but the way you handle eye contact, obviously, if you're speaking to a number of people, is that you identify one person, you make a couple of seconds of eye contact, and then you move on before they feel uncomfortable.

And you can move on to individuals with your eyes like that. So strike individual eye contact, stay there for a couple of seconds, move on, and sort of dart around the room like that. It's a very natural way to do public speaking. You're not reading from your notes. You're not just staring at the back of the wall impersonally, but you're engaging. Facial expressions are great for that. Also vary your facial expressions. Be a little bit emotional with your faith. It helps people follow along and draws them emotionally into what you're speaking about so that you can affect their attitude towards the material.

7. Instructor Poise & Body Language

Let's talk about instructor poise and body language. So as you can see, this young man is very poised, very confident, and assertive looking in the way that he's dressed and in his posture. So poise is all about presenting with balance and grace. And this can be hard when you first get started because you are very nervous. You don't know what you look like when you're teaching. It'll take some time to really hone it, but one way to check yourself is by taking some videos of yourself teaching.

So it can be really uncomfortable to watch that at first, but it's really great because you can start to see what you look like and if there are any distracting behaviours or little mannerisms that make you look less than poised and less than confident. There are some questions about this on the CTT Plus exam. things like maybe twiddling a pen incessantly throughout the entire course. Very distracting. Or there might be something you do with your hair over and over again. If you do some of those things in your video submission, you might get dinged too.

So pay some attention to that. Good posture is important. This helps with the projection of your speech and also gives off confidence and poise. So to make sure you have good posture, what you can do is try this, preferably when nobody's looking, but you put your shoulders and your ears together, push them back, and then drop them naturally. And that gives you this good lengthening of your spine, this good, solid posture, but you don't look overly stiff. Clothes and Grooming We've talked a little bit about this already, but you want to make sure that your clothes are appropriate for the HR requirements of the organisation that you're teaching in.

Make sure that they are fitting for the industry that you work in. And this is just a suggestion, but you might want to dress just slightly more formally than your audience. So a tie and a coat may not be required in the workplace, but if you wear something a little nicer than you do, you'll command respect. And it's very clear to everybody who the teacher is. So give some thought to that. Gestures are part of body language. There are two types of gestures. There are emphatic gestures. Those are the ones that you really nail in the main point or bring attention to what you're saying.

And they're also descriptive, which show the size of something or how small it is, or shapes and things like that, or the direction that something's going. So use both of those and get familiar with using your arms. If you find your arms are pinned to your side when you're teaching, try and loosen up a bit and practise making gestures. You might even mark them in your notes to begin with until they become a little bit more intuitive and natural. And then finally smile. It's hard to smile when you're nervous. Agreed. You might have to kind of paint it on, but smiling puts your audience at ease. It makes you kind of friendly and equal right off the bat. So even before you start speaking, the first thing you can do when you address your audience is look them in the eye and smile. Smile. and that really breaks the ice. makes you feel confident. You'll get some reciprocal smiles back, and you'll be ready to go. So pay attention to your poise and body language, and you'll give off that mature technical trainer vibe that you're looking for.

8. Responding to Learner Behavior

It's tempting to think that once you've designed a course and put a lot of thought and attention into it, you can just deliver it. But remember, you're not teaching in a vacuum. You're not just going to press "play"; you're not going to set it and forget it. But you do need to be responding in real time to learner behaviour to make sure that you engage them and that you're really meeting the needs of the learners. So to begin with, you need to command their attention, and you may need to make some very explicit statements about turning phones off.

You might need to be very direct that your students not be scrolling through social media or sending unnecessary text messages during class if there are computers out at the workstations and you don't want there to be any web surfing throughout the course. So you may need to state those things directly and set a standard for the classroom. Also, it's your responsibility to maintain interest. So if you see people drifting or if their eye contact is fading, you need to read the room and perhaps vary your style of delivery so that you can gain everyone's attention. This is when you pull the trigger on one of those backup activities, which is very energetic to kind of get people wrapped up in the information again.

So keep your finger on the pulse of how everyone's feeling and adjust and respond to that learner feedback the whole way through your course. You are not just lecturing; you are engaging learners. So you elicit their input. You have group discussions; you ask encouraging questions and ask them to have input on the topic in whatever way they want. And this way everybody is involved in carrying out the instructions. You do need to be aware that sometimes questions will get distracting. So although you do want to provide plenty of opportunities for questions and answers so that students can explore their knowledge, if questions get distracting, you need to be able to divert the attention away from the distracting learner and back on to the topic at hand. So you'll find that some people ask questions just to be seeking or to prove that they know a lot about the technology or the topic that's under discussion.

Or they might be doing it to just be disrespectful to you or to be kind of a class clown or something. Or they might just be off topic, time-wasting questions that seem to never end. So, if you get a student like this, you obviously want to answer a few of their questions, but if it goes on and on, you might need to just kind of firmly but politely say, "I'd like to see what some of the others in the class think." If you have some of these other questions, maybe we can talk after class about them. Another suggestion is to write down questions that are not specific to the learning objectives but that you'd like to answer later.

You can always drop them on the whiteboard or let the students know that I'm writing them down on a piece of paper for later, so that when we get to the material that addresses them, I'll be sure to answer this question. So that's one way of handling off topic questions. But don't let your classroom get derailed. When good, meaningful questions arise, be sure that you're answering them directly and providing the learner with the information they need. So you might need to clarify the question. If they ask a question, you might repeat it back, in other words, and say, "So, if I understand you correctly, you're asking this Repeat the question back in different words, and you'll get some feedback from them. Yeah, that was the question I was asking.

And then you can offer more information to answer the question. so many clarifying questions from the audience. really assures the learner that they're being heard and assures you that they are absorbing the information that they need to. And like we mentioned before, as a reminder, feel free to say, "I don't know." If you don't know, don't give bad information. Don't feel that it makes you any less credible as an instructor. You can say you don't know. You can offer to answer it later in the course or after class, or you can simply state that it's not relevant to the course objectives and that you have to move on. So keep in step with your audience. Listen to their feedback, observe their feedback, and make adjustments so that it's not just you teaching, but you're really offering learner focused education.

9. Handling Disruptive Behavior

I wish I could promise that every one of your learners in every one of your future technical courses is going to be mature, motivated to learn, and focused on the material. But the reality is that if you do this for any length of time, you will encounter disruptive learner behavior. As adult students, you shouldn't have to deal with this too much. I have a lot of experience, not only with adult students but also with high school and middle school students, and you get quite a bit there.

But as adults, most students are there to learn, and they're focused on what's going on. They might even be paying for the information, so they're not likely to misbehave. But there are times when the learner is not really on board and has the wrong attitude about the training. And so you do need to be prepared for their disruptive behavior. And if you find yourself in this situation, keep this slide handy so that you can refer back to it and some of the techniques that we're about to discuss. Number one, don't take it personally. As we've already mentioned, you've put a lot of time into being confident and presenting assertively in the classroom. So don't let this throw you off kilter. It's not about you, the quality of your course, your ability to teach, or your knowledge of the subject.

It's not about that. It's about the attitude of the learner and something that's going on in their life, perhaps, that is not allowing them to harness their focus on the topics at hand. So don't let it get in your head; handle it assertively. So one thing that could happen is that learners will give lengthy, critical comments. Maybe they keep going on and on about the technology, about bugs in the technology, or about things that they don't like about the implementation. Or they would much rather it be done this way or that way in the organization. One or two of these are okay and understandable, but if they go on, you might need to even cut this lecturer off so that in their comments they don't take up too much class time. So wait for a pause in their speech, and then step in. Take that moment that they take a breath, and you can just cut in right there and say, "Thank you very much for that." Let's see if someone else has something to say. So you may need to just hop in there, take that moment of pause, and cut them off.

And then, if it keeps going on and you've had to do it more than once, talk to them privately at the break. They may not even be aware of what they're doing. You might need to just remind them or make them aware that it could be distracting to other learners and not appropriate for your class. Another problem you could run into is chatting with other classmates during a presentation. So they're in the back of the room, and they're chatting off topic or having private conversations. Set some ground rules for this at the very beginning; make it clear that you're not going to allow it in your classroom. And if you see it happening while you're speaking, somebody's talking. You can't just address it directly right there. You can't just say, "Excuse me, Ms. Such, Mr. Such, and such." Was there something that you wanted to add?

And that makes people realise what they're doing? They'll stop, and usually that's all it takes. If the whole class is talking and they're not giving you their attention or respect, one way to handle that is to simply stop talking. That uncomfortable. 30 seconds of silence is enough for everybody to realise something's up and to look back at you. And you can use that eye contact to gather everyone's attention back. You may also have an issue with overt hostility, and hopefully this doesn't happen. But there is a chance somebody is absolutely trying to malign you and derail your class. If that's the case, address it unambiguously. Remember, be firm that it's inappropriate for the class. Use those words; this is inappropriate for the class. and then talk to them privately at the break. If it doesn't improve, you do have to ask them to leave. And if you're part of a larger training organization, you should have support if you ever find yourself in that situation. So be prepared. You won't see too much of this. But make sure you handle it in a way that is professional and that commands dignity, and you'll be all right.

10. Review - Domain 3

All right, it's time for our domain-three review of instructor credibility and communications. So we started this section by talking about professionalism, remembering that you're a business person, right? So no matter what type of organisation you're working for, we always try to fulfil our contractual obligations and make sure that we're conducting ourselves based on the policies and procedures of the organization. And by all means, we want to be easy to work with, right? That's how we get invited back as technical trainers to teach again. We also talked about demonstrating confidence and mastery of the subject.

And the key thing to remember is preparation, right? We prepare what we're going to say. We prepare the space that we're going to teach in. We even prepare our clothes so that we feel confident in our skin and that we project professionalism and assertiveness in the classroom. We also learned that connecting with learners early on is important by means of maybe some humor, an anecdote, an interest, or an arousing question or statement at the beginning. It is important to get everybody engaged before you ask for the audience's attention of the audience. And then we went into quite a bit of depth on oral communication skills. You'll remember breathing, articulating, how to use gestures, and body language while we teach. All these things take some time to master, and it's an ongoing process. But remember, taking some video of yourself can be helpful. You can look back on what you look like, and in time you'll really hone your abilities as a public speaker.

Along with this, there was poise and body language. One thing to remember is to limit distracting instructor behavior. Twiddling pens, playing with your hair, or doing anything else that is going to distract the learners from the material We want to limit that sort of behaviour as an instructor. And finally, we talked about responding to learner behavior. So we are doing our best to answer questions, clarifying the questions that we get from the audience, and then giving them the information that will help them really comprehend the concept. And finally, we talked a bit about handling disruptive behavior, how to be assertive and unambiguous when we have to shut down bad behavior, and remembering that we always have the backing of the training organisation as we do this. So if we remember these things about professionalism—keeping our credibility intact and also communicating clearly—then we will be successful in our delivery of our technical training course.

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