Guidelines for session chairs

Thanks for agreeing to chair a session at NACAA. If you haven’t done something like this before, here are some guidelines to help you get it right:

• Most importantly, you need to know the schedule for your session, who the speakers are, and the titles of their talks.
• Keep each speaker to their allocated time slot, which is usually 30 minutes including intro and Q&A.
• Keep your intro short. The speaker’s bio and abstract are on the NACAA website. Just announce their name and the title of their talk: “Our next speaker is Joanna Smith and the title of her talk today is ‘What a great story I have for you!'” Feel free to vary this, but keep your intro under one minute.
• Ignore this if you are chairing a keynote session. Use a minute or two more to introduce the speaker using their bio information on the NACAA website.
• Some speakers will run long. If so, you have to cut their presentation short. Tell the audience that the speaker will be happy to take questions after the session, then move on.
• Some speakers will run short, which is a problem as we need to stick to the advertised broadcast schedule. Try to encourage Q&A from the audience. If that fails, see next.
• Some speakers will get no questions. Try to stay awake during their talk and come up with a question, just in case.
• If, in spite of your best efforts, the presentation still runs short, let the audience know that we need to wait for any broadcast attendees before you start the next talk on schedule.
• You control the Q&A. There will be a couple of roving microphones that will be passed around the crowd by helpers. Try to make sure that the helpers pass the mics to the people who’ve been waiting the longest.
• There may be some technical switchover stuff going on during the Q&A part of each presentation. Just ignore it.

Thanks again for your help.