Dr. Sheila Robinson is a master at engaging an audience. She’s honed this skill through decades of work in education where you have to know how to take the pulse of a room and determine whether a change in direction is needed to keep the group tuned in. You might think I’m talking about middle school students but teaching teachers is just as rough. We know this to be true first hand.

That’s how Sheila and I bonded – our mutual background in education and our shared interest in audience engagement strategies.

Even though Sheila and I are both done with our days ruled by the dismissal bell, we still both use our teaching skills REGULARLY in our workshops. In addition to her own workshops on survey design, Sheila has joined Evergreen Data and now delivers data visualization and reporting workshops for me. We are typically on opposite sides of the country at the same time.

One of the things I love about how well Dr. Robinson represents Evergreen Data on the road is her masterful ability to keep an audience engaged for 6 entire hours. She wrote up a guide on 20 audience engagement strategies that we incorporate in my workshops all the time.

She can sense when it is time to break from the lecture and start an activity, like a Turn and Talk.

She can smell in the air when people just need to talk to their neighbors for a minute, so she’ll launch something like a Think-Pair-Share.

She intuits that, mid-afternoon, audiences need to get up and move as part of the workshop, so our workshops often include a Gallery Walk after a slide makeover activity.

Sheila keeps our workshops deeply educational and highly interactive because we know that those things, put together, create life-altering professional development.

Find out more about a workshop with Sheila (or me – hey, I’m pretty good) and book your next high-impact skill-building session on our Workshops page.