How can a teacher make sessions more engaging?

In a response to a previous post about what makes a great teacher, a friend asked this question,
"How do we train a teacher to engage the students? Considering he has the knowledge.. and can communicate reasonably well.."

This one caught me by surprise. I guess I had just assumed that some people are able to engage an audience and some are not. That would be tantamount to admitting that engaging speakers are born, not made. So let me attempt to do here what my Alma mater taught me to do - break down the problem into its component parts.

I looked back at the times I was truly engaged, and tried to identify what had to come together for it to happen. Here are a few things that I have come up with.

1. Relevant Content. The topic was either of inherent interest to me or the speaker managed to make it interesting for the duration of that session. How does one make a topic interesting? By telling a story. There is a reason why parables are sticky. Students do not like teachers who dispense gyan. 

2. Contextual Familiarity. The speaker was able to connect the topic of discussion with examples of something else that I might already be familiar with. Providing examples that the audience can identify with can be the difference between having the audience in rapt attention or suffering the ignominy of watching them zone out, or worse, reach for their phones.

3. Handling questions with respect. Nothing turns off a student audience more that a teacher who avoids a question by saying something like, "You don't need to know. It is not in the syllabus," or "It is too complicated to explain." In case the time required to answer a complicated question is un-affordable, or if such a discussion runs the risk of alienating the rest of the audience, a wise teacher will provide a short answer and welcome the student to follow up after class. Needless to say, "Let us take this off-line," should not become a ploy to avoid difficult questions.

The biggest enemies of engagement are apathy, boredom and disdain. Relevance cures apathy and Contextual Familiarity can cure boredom. Being respectful endears the speaker to the audience.