Hi there. In this video, we've got a special guest. Sara Bassendale, one of
the lead trainers from to Be a Better Guide Academy. Now Sara, to start this
video, we're going to do something really funny. Oh yeah Why is that? That's just
something we like to do. Make people laugh but something really clever and
off the top, it's kind of a thing. But your other videos weren't funny. Hi there
it's Erin Kelsey from the Be a Better Guide Academy. Today, we are going to be
talking about the book "Interpretation making a difference on purpose" by Dr.
Sam ham from the University of Idaho. So what got us excited about doing this
video is that the field of interpretation is probably better known
to guides that work in the natural or environmental field. So for example,
national park rangers or a guide that works in the zoo or aquarium. This is
what we love at be a better guide. Learning from one another and sharing
best practices that work in one field and using them to make us better tour
leaders. So we're going to break down one of Dr. hams' central teachings on
interpretation. Essentially, the TORE method, T.O.R.E. Let's take a look. Dr.
Ham defines interpretation as a process aimed of provoking audiences to do their
own thinking and thereby develop their own understanding of your topic by
presenting information with a strong and relevant being. Researchers have found
that audiences are more engaged and more likely to really think about what you're
saying. So in other words, it's putting together your information in a way that
resonates with your audience. The T.O.R.E or TORE model developed by Dr. Ham is an
acronym and guide to effective interpretation. These four qualities
actually emerge from a huge body of research on how humans respond to
communication when it's done really well. Interpretation needs to be four things.
One, it needs to have a theme. Two, be organized. Three, to be relevant and Four,
be enjoyable. So let's take a look at each of these. Your information should
have a theme while presenting or sharing information on a topic. A theme makes
your job easier because it gives you some guidelines for what to include, what
to exclude and what to emphasize. Now, don't confuse a topic with a theme. So
topic is your kind of general subject matter but a theme is really a specific
idea or the main point that you want to communicate to your group. And themes are
great because it allows you to answer that question, of all the things that I
know, what am I going to share with my group today. For example, let's say our
topic is ants. The theme could be, asked to teach present-day miners a thing or
two about underground architecture or answer trying to solve architectural
problems in ways that we're still trying to understand. As a guideline, we want our
theme to be simple and we want to be able to see it in a single sentence. Your
information should be organized. Interpretation is organized when it's
presented in a way that's easy to follow. In other words, interpretive moments are
at their best when your audience doesn't need to do a ton of work. This can
sometimes happen if your material is dense, complicated or hard to follow. Dr.
Ham references over a dozen studies that show most people can handle about four
different pieces of information at a time.
Meaning that, you want no more than four main ideas with your senior. If our theme
is ants could teach present-day miners a thing or two about underground
architecture. Our four main talking points could be size and scaling, design,
efficiency and master communicators and we could have some talking points around
each of these sub schemes instead of listing unconnected facts or delivering
a stream of consciousness. We want to take the time to organize our delivery.
Remember, no more than four additional ideas for our central theme. Three your
information should be relevant. A presentation or an interpretive moment
on tour that's relevant to an audience have two characteristics. It's gonna be
personal and it's going to be meaningful. Now meaningful in this instance simply
means that we've got to connect new ideas that we're sharing two ideas that
are already present in the minds of our audience. If you think about how any of
us approach new information we relate it to past experience or have a context for
it. So the classic example is something that's not meaningful, if something
that's causing confusion or maybe using too many technical terms, jargon or
abbreviations. You see time we've got to dynamically predominate those
enterprise-level uses as we don't and it's going to show up in our KPD and
if it shows up in our KPD and you my friend are SOL. I couldn't agree more.
So we can use examples, analogies, contrast similes or metaphors to help
make this connection. For example, to explain the strength of an ant to a
group, we could ask them to imagine their father picking up an SUV and walking
down the street. For our topic or presentation to be relevant, it's
got to be meaningful which just means, we've got to relate it to something our
audience knows but we also have to relate it to something that they care
about and that's where that personal side comes in. It's great thinking, how
the heck do I do that? Well, it turns out it might be easier
than you think. Studies have shown that there are universal concepts that human
beings back through time and across cultures all care about. You might
recognize some of these things. Their the emotions so, happiness, sadness, anger
jealousy. It could be some of our biological functions hunger and thirst
and birth and death and then of course, our fascination with mystery with the
cosmos and ethics and morality. Almost every story movie or television series
revolves around one or more of these universal concepts. Use these universals
to make your audience care about your theme and create a deeper connection
with your material. For example, beyond impressing people with all of our
amazing anthrax, talk about how important they are to us as human beings without
ants to disperse seeds to pollinate plants and aerate soil. We humans would
lose all stars of our garden farms and flower beds. And lastly, your information
and interpretation should be enjoyable. Successful communication is enjoyable
when it's mentally pleasing or satisfying in some way. So here we can
think of those guides who are entertaining, engaging, maybe really funny
but it also covers the fact that lots of us just love learning and sometimes the
things we're learning about may be scary or sad or surprising or even depressing.
Most audiences will enjoy being involved in some way and will appreciate your
humor and levity. Engaging their five senses is a great idea as well as using
interaction, music, props and visual aids. Generally, we want to try to be informal
and use casual or conversational tone. Just remember, as Louie Armstrong
would say, when you smile, the whole world smiles with you. So if you're relaxed and
having fun as a cheerleader, your audience is going to be more relaxed and
have more fun too. So as a quick recap, here's the full TORE method. Your
interpretive moment should be somatic, organized, relevant and enjoyable. Think
of this acronym as another tool in your toolbox for inspiring your guests to
care more deeply about the information you share. To help you with this, we've created
a PDF cheat sheet of the TORE method. Think of this as a tool another resource
that you can use when you're working on your tour or maybe creating a new and
moment or a special presentation on tour. You can grab that using the link below.
We also highly recommend grabbing Dr. Ham's book, Interpretation
making a difference on purpose. There's tons of great tips in there for
improving your tour. You can find a link to that book down below. Mm-hmm we'll put
that link there too. We also would ask you to share this video if you're
inspired, you have a friend or colleague or somebody who might benefit from it
and in the comments, let us know if you have tips for having better interpretive
moments on tour. Thank you so much for being here and we'll see you next time.
One of the best things we found when making this video is there's something
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