Fluff your lines and the participants will not be sure what to do. Make a mess of using a tool and you might appear incompetent, and so destroy your carefully cultivated professional image.
But there is a faster and more certain way to remember and fluently give instructions to your students or participants.
It's all connected to how we "program" our brains using language and gesture. It's the way we learned to do new stuff when we were very young.
At a certain stage in their development, children talk silently to themselves to sequence and organize new actions. Older people occasionally do the same. We think aloud when faced with a complex/difficult task, when under pressure or when we feel tired. If we are a teacher or presenter, our external "inner speech" can quickly become a muddle with hard-to-remember precise instructions, old speech routines that belong to another topic and the authority speech we use to keep the group under behavioral control.
But if we associate gestures with the instructions, magically we remember the correct sequence, a kind of spatial or kinesthetic memory. Memories of the words and gestures point to each other in memory and reinforce each other.
Gestures and speech go literally hand-in-hand. They fit like a glove. Sometime gestures complete what we say, or explain with a flourish what we mean, develop a life of their own or even become independent languages. Emblems are gestures with special meanings such as thumbs-up for "Yes!" Signs are a language in their own right, such as pointing to yourself to indicate "me". And pantomimes are complete stories using gestures of various kinds.
The orchestration of speech and gesture occurs in Broca's area, a part of the brain where the sequencing of motor and speech actions are side-by-side. The same mirror neurons fire when we see others performing an action as when we do it ourselves. What begins in young children as pointing and grasping becomes a veritable avalanche of gestures at about age three co-expressed with the sequencing of words.
Here's a workshop to practice gestures, emblems, pantomimes and signs:
1. Brainstorm a list of all the different kinds of GESTURES you have seen people use when they communicate with others e.g. OK sign where the thumb and pointer finger make an “O”.
2. Take turns to explain to your partner, “what Life’s like at my house”. Make notes of the GESTURES that each person uses and what they were saying at the time. Then capture a list of the gestures: what people were saying.
3. As a group, play two rounds of Charades. After each turn, from memory name the mystery activity and describe the GESTURES each person used to offer clues.
4. EMBLEMS are gesticulations which have developed their own special meanings e.g. V for victory. Describe as many emblems as you can.
5. SIGNS are a complete language in themselves. Design a language using a mixture of signs for common concepts as such as me, you, come, go, up, down, into, through, house, car,
6. PANTOMIMES are sequences of gestures that tell a story. Craft a description of some gestures and the story that they tell.. e.g. you and I will drink tea...(points to other person, then points to self, then holds thumb and first finger together and lifts to mouth).
7. Propose a hypothesis for how gestures, emblems, pantomines and signs might develop in childhood. Consider these points in your theory. Brain cells represent cells. Speech and gesture are co-expressive. The orchestration of motor and speech actions are side by side in Broca's area of of frontal lobe. The same mirror neurons in Broca's area fire off when people watch others perform an action and when they perform the action themselves.
8. Design a learning activity which makes use of the features of mirror neurons and the co-expression of gesture and speech.
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