Being Table Topics Master can be great fun. You are basically acting as a facilitator for your fellow club members by igniting the spark of creativity. As a believer in Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Theory and long time trainer, I remembered one of the key premises from my years in college: stimulate multiple intelligences at once.
According to Gardner, humans have several significant intellectual capacities or intelligences:
If you only stimulate one, you are going to get one result. If you stimulate two or more simultaneously, be prepared to be surprised.
So how does this applies to Table Topics?
This link is full if great Table Topic ideas, so basically what I did was combine two of the ideas I found here. I gave a scenario, posed a question (linguistic intelligence) and added the unknown variable of having to use your sense of touch (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence) to get an object out of the bag without looking. This object became the core of the impromptu speeches.
The result was great fun (especially form me!) and we got to hear some really creative responses from our club members.
Here are some of the questions I used for this exercise including an introduction and the objects that people pulled out of my magical bag.
When I received the email to participate in this meeting I was thinking a lot about creativity and how to be more creative for myself, to branch out my business and to make better food. Then when Teresa sent me a message asking me what was my favorite toy when I was a child, it really got me thinking about the following questions. In your opinion, who are more creative, children or adults? I think usually children because they are not afraid to say what they think, or to use their imagination to create scenarios where the impossible could be real. Today I’m going to ask you to be like a child. Free up your imagination and let yourself be creative, even if what you say is totally crazy, because believe me, you’ll have no choice.
TableTopics are design to teach how to improvise, to be a quick thinker, and whenever possible to provide an answer of at least 1 minute with a structure, that is, with a beginning, middle and end.
The rules are the following. First I’m going to read the question. Then you’re going to reach into the bag without looking. And then I’m going to repeat the question again.
Imagine that you are the object you have just pulled out of the bag. Describe your life to us and tell us why it is great to be you.
The object you just pulled out comes from very far away and despite its humble appearance, it is very special because it has magical powers. What are those magical powers? What awesome things can it do?
Imagine that you are a powerful genie, like the one in Aladdin and king asks you for the most amazing object in the known world. When you make the object appear, the king looks confused and disappointed. Explain to him why this is the most amazing object in the known world.
The object you have in your hands used to be a politician. But he/she did something very shameful and a powerful sorcerer punished him/her by turning him into what you see right now. Please tell us what happened.
You have just won a Nobel Prize because of the object you got from the bag. You are in a press conference surrounded by journalists from around the world and they want to know how you won.
Happy Table Topics!
Aline Casanova 