How to Chair Academic Talks
Why am I qualified to write this guide? Well, my chairing skills get remarked upon a lot, and quite recently, a senior philosopher even jokingly gave me their "Chair of the Year" award! I have a system going with chairing that ensures responsible time-keeping and equitable distribution of Q&A time among audience members. Sometimes community members ask for my tips on chairing, and I thought I'd just formalize it and make it available here, since this is a skill that is rarely explicitly taught.
In my mind, when you chair, you should have two priorities:
Why am I qualified to write this guide? Well, my chairing skills get remarked upon a lot, and quite recently, a senior philosopher even jokingly gave me their "Chair of the Year" award! I have a system going with chairing that ensures responsible time-keeping and equitable distribution of Q&A time among audience members. Sometimes community members ask for my tips on chairing, and I thought I'd just formalize it and make it available here, since this is a skill that is rarely explicitly taught.
In my mind, when you chair, you should have two priorities:
- The first is to keep time. You want to ensure that the presentation and the Q&A do not go over time. In order to do this, here are my go-to practices:
- Check with speakers/presenters beforehand on how long they plan to speak for, and whether and how in advance they want time reminders;
- At the start of the Q&A, I remind everyone how much time is left for the Q&A, ask people to raise their hand if they have a question, and keep their hands raised until I write their names down. I will pick one person to ask a question first, and then quickly produce a queue of questioners on my notepad.
- After the first question is answered, I read out the entire queue to everyone, ask people to remember their position in the queue, and remind everyone again how long we have left for Q&A.
- I find reading out the queue and reminding people of remaining time to be especially helpful. Sometime people would even voluntarily give up their spot on the queue after hearing how long it is!
- It is good to remember people's names, or walk around the room to write down their names from the name tags.
- I use a hand/finger system to keep things in order (raise a hand if you have a question, and raise a finger if you have a follow up), and usually (jokingly) remark that "please note that fingers are not your way to jump the queue" to avoid abuse of the system.
- Be assertive and forceful about follow-ups, especially when there's not enough time.
- Equally important is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable and included in the discussion. In order to do this, here are my go-to practices:
- Prioritize questions from gender and racial minorities, and junior people in your queue, so their questions get air time.
- In later talks, prioritize questions from people who have not spoken much.
- Check with speakers beforehand (during coffee/lunch breaks) on how they want to be introduced (name/institutions/pronouns), and whether they welcome questions during their talks, what kind of questions they allow during talks (clarificatory, content, etc.), who among the audience members they particularly want feedback from, and who they are uncomfortable with for safety reasons.
- If the speaker is fine with clarificatory questions during their talk, but not with substantive questions, I usually (jokingly) remark at the beginning that "if you are unsure which is which, please leave it at the end" to avoid abuse of the system.