Effective Whiteboard
Teaching adults and instructing them can be very difficult, especially if you haven’t taken any instructional technique courses. Many adult teachers who teach or speak to adults have trouble getting across to the group and the usual cause is lack of credibility.
One of the key things that you will notice is that adults do not respond to other adults in a position of authority, such as an instructor, if they aren’t credible. You can really easily deny your credibility to your audience by not being prepared or fiddling through stacks of notes. Reading off of a note page is not a good instructional technique.
It is also easy to build your credibility with adults, and it’s just as easy to build it as it is to lose your credibility. You can increase your credibility, for starters, by knowing the information that you are teaching or giving inside out. By knowing your information, you can easily stop, start, answer questions and move around the information as you need to, going with the flow of the class that you have in front of you. The dynamics in an adult classroom or meeting setting change from group to group and you have to have the ability to go with that flow—if you can’t, then you immediately lose your credibility.
One of the best ways add credibility to your seminar with adults is by using a white board. Whether this is a plain paper flip chart or a whiteboard , it can be used to highlight, punctuate and move fluidly through information. With a whiteboard, you can easily flip to a fresh, new topic and add more information because that is where the class is taking you, then if you need to go back to other information, it is already there and readily available. You don’t have to be an artist or a instructional guru to pull it off, just know your information, go with the flow of the group in front of you and make good use of your whiteboard.
