How to Brief your Guest Speakers for a Better Learning Experience
How much information do you need to provide when briefing a guest speaker? The answer is probably not as much as you think.
Guest speakers can add incredible value to a course, especially when they are from a relevant organisation or industry, as participants can learn first-hand about the inside workings and current trends of an industry. To get the most value out of a guest speaker session, you’ll want to create a good brief.
The high-level brief
When briefing your speaker, going into detail about what you want them to cover can make logical sense. However, I’ve found guest speakers are much more effective, passionate, and interesting when they have autonomy and a wide remit. The role of the guest speaker is to enhance the learning experience, while the programme itself is delivered by the teaching team.
Instead of going into the details about the course, give your speaker an overview so they know where they fit into the overall picture. This allows the speaker to talk about their strengths without feeling the need to fit into a restrained topic. It also opens up room for them to add valuable and unique perspectives. When a speaker shares their journey, they are more relatable, which builds a rapport with participants and elicits more questions. The course delivery team can then make the sedge ways for it all to fit together within the course structure.
As an example, we recently ran a day-long session on commercial negotiation. Our speaker gave participants real-life pragmatic insights which underpinned the whole day. With a more constrained brief, some of these valuable insights would never have been shared. In one example the guest speaker talked through procurement and they made suggestions to contractual elements which could be revisited and removed an unnecessary blocker for progressing with the project. The participants found these insights incredibly pragmatic.
As well as an over-arching theme, other information speakers will find useful include:
Planning ahead
Having the right speaker is just as important as providing a good brief. This requires planning and preparation, which starts as early as in the course design process.
Sometimes, having a speaker is the priority to providing maximum impact on a course and there are various ways you can go about planning them into your course. For a course I designed recently, I created a plan in advance which included four speaker slots, each with a specific theme. Interested parties were then contacted, some of whom offered to speak.
Some notes about online sessions
Due to accessibility and cost, it’s sometimes more practical to deliver fully online or blended courses. However, it can be challenging to maintain the energy in an online session. Taking some steps to help speaker and participants build a rapport will help to make the session engaging.
Switching on cameras can help build a rapport between speaker and participants, and will be closer to delivering a talk in person. Therefore, try to encourage as many participants as possible to switch on their cameras.
Additionally, suggest to your guest speaker that they don’t use slides. Using slides can cause a challenging environment for building a relationship between speaker and audience. For the participants, looking at slides takes time away from connecting with the speaker. For the speaker, depending on their setup, they may not be able to see their audience, which means they get no feedback.
Ask your speaker to share their story. While expertise is important, stories help people to relate and connect. Making the story the priority will help the speaker to engage their audience and build that all-important rapport.
Benefits for speakers
An engaging guest speaker session is not only an enriching experience for course participants, it’s also a great opportunity for the speaker too as it provides an opening for them to build their reputation outside of their direct audience and extend their network and visibility.
Additionally, by giving your speakers autonomy, as discussed earlier, they feel more involved in the programme. By buying into the programme internally, they also help to market it.
In summary, learning is an all-round experience about connecting and sparking ideas from a variety of sources. Involving guest speakers and allowing them the independence to do an amazing job will enhance your course and the learning experience.