HEPP-Workshop "Speaking out of the box in the academic context"

Friday 25 Sept 2026, 09:00 → 17:00 Europe/Berlin

Zoom (The Zoom link will be announced to the participants.) (online)

If all places are fully booked, we can put you on the waiting list.

 

The ability to go “off-topic”, elaborate creatively on a theme, or answer challenging and unexpected questions are skills often required for academic speakers – and mark the difference between basic competence and true flexibility and communicative confidence in your chosen area of expertise. 

Learning the building blocks of spontaneous speaking, and how to work more freely and creatively with structure and information not only gives you more confidence and flexibility with your material but allows you and your listeners the opportunity to approach a subject from new angles with freshness and elan. 

In this workshop participants learn through role-plays and exercises to juggle structure according to the situation, link creatively, and use the familiar information in an unfamiliar and flexible way. The workshop comprises: 
- The beginner’s mind: Improvisation exercises for creative thinking 
- Juggling content: Being flexible with structure and linking information 
- In the box, out of the box: Going deep into a theme or providing a broad overview? 
- The perfect espresso: Making complex information bitesize 
- The question of questions: Strategies for responding to the unexpected 
- Bringing it together: Specific role-plays for specific skills 
- Speaking out of the box: My next steps 

Trainer: Orlando Schenk, Nothweiler, studied singing and speech at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, Speech Science at  Regensburg University, is a speaker and speech trainer at the Akademie für gesprochenes Wort in Stuttgart. He has worked for over twenty years as a communication and rhetoric trainer in various institutions both in Germany and the UK, in particular in universites and research institutes. His areas of expertise include speech and voice training, non-verbal communication, 
assertiveness and improvisation.