Picture This:
You’re seated at a long table. Your seat is stiff, flat, and backless plastic colored a dingy blue. As you shift in the attempt to find comfort, the student-sized seat creaks in protest. The long table in front of you was cleaned with an unknown chemical that left behind residue and a faint odor that will make you nauseous over the course of the three hours you’ll sit at this cramped cafeteria table. You and your colleagues sit too close for comfort; your colleague’s breath smells faintly of coffee and cigarette smoke that she tries to hide with a heavy, floral perfume. (Notably, this doesn’t work.) Papers rustle and phones ding quietly as the speaker at the front of the room clicks to slide number eight out of infinity while they drone on in monotone.
A small beam of light captures your attention and you watch as tiny bits of dust shift in synchronicity. You remember watching a dust mote in a sunbeam like that in your home as a child while your cat lay in the warm pool of light at the bottom. A soft smile reaches your lips, but your colleague draws you out of this daydream when she taps on your shoulder to ask if you have another pencil. You dig in your bag to retrieve a 0.7 Bic mechanical pencil in lime green. When you hand it to her, you bump your phone and its lock screen awakens. The time is 8:33 am. You have been in this professional learning for three minutes.
It’s going to be a long day.
We’ve all been there.
As I conclude my 17th year in education, I can’t count how many professional development courses I attended where I learned about how to teach effectively that were presented in an ineffective way.
According to The Mirage (TNTP, 2015, p. 2):
“Districts are making a massive investment in teacher improvement – far larger than most people realize. Despite these efforts, most teachers do not appear to improve substantially from year to year – even though many have not yet mastered critical skills. Even when teachers do improve, we were unable to link their growth to any particular development strategy. School systems are not helping teachers understand how to improve – or even that they have room to improve at all.”
We overload teachers with professional development with the intent to help, but it is far from helpful (TNTP, 2015). And believe me when I say that teachers notice. A majority of teachers find the one-time workshop model of professional development useless (Gulamhussein, 2013).
What could effective PD look like?
According to Teaching the Teachers (Gulamhussein, 2013):
Professional learning is not a one-and-done deal. It should be significant and ongoing. During implementation, teachers need support to address the specific challenges of changing classroom practice. Teachers should participate actively in making sense of a new practice during the initial exposure. Modeling is effective to help teachers understand a new practice. Teachers should engage in content and/or grade-level specific learning.
Sit-and-get learning may still be incorporated into this new system of professional learning, albeit infrequently. To ensure that it’s meaningful, there are steps we can take to improve our presentation skills.
Improving Presentations with Story and Slidedecks
Simply put, brain science supports the use of stories to convey information. As Nancy Duarte (2013) shared, the structure of stories has been used for 1000’s of years. Even pre-literate cultures used stories to pass down morals, values, and lore. How do we know? Think about the story I told at the beginning of this blog. Could you picture it? Did you hear the seat creak? Could you feel and smell the room? Did you see the beam of light, the droning presenter, or a long-lost pet? Stories pass through our rational frontal lobe and connect with our “heart”, or rather our limbic system. The connection between stories and presenting – while groundbreaking in how it could shape presentations – is not new, but old. That is, we have a literal, uncontrollable physical reaction when we connect with a story.
Incorporating Story
How should we incorporate a story into a presentation? There are a few different models presented. In her TEDTalk Nancy Duarte Uncovers the Common Structure of Greatest Communicators, Nancy Duarte (2010) shares a few models for storytelling. One example she mentions is Aristotle’s Three-Act Play, the Hero’s Journey, and finally Freytag’s Dramatic Story Structure. All of these different varieties include important information to include in a presentation. For example, use a structure that includes a transformation. Also, be certain to include a resolution. Finally, use the hero archetype to connect to the audience. That is use your presentation to make the audience the hero of the story. Then you, as the presenter, guide, mold, and manipulate them like the mentor that you are.
Images from ReedsyBlog, Conor Neill, and ClearVoice.
Duarte (2010) ended her talk by comparing the structure that all compelling speakers use. She called this the Sparkline:
Her greatest instruction is to “plant resistance between what is and what could be” (Duarte, 2010). Duarte (2010) suggested:
- Modeling for the audience what you want them to feel.
- Use of repetition.
- Use metaphors and visual words
- Incorporate familiar songs and scriptures
- Draw on relatable experiences
- Directly compare what currently is to what could be.
For the last turning point, a good speaker should review the call to action and describe the new bliss (Duarte, 2010). In fact, “people will remember the last thing you said more than the beginning or middle” (Duarte, 2010). This reiterates the importance of the call to action in your presentation.
YOU are the Presentation
“Bad slide presentations don’t require a presenter to be interesting, informative, or even present” (Gonzalez, 2013). On the other hand, good slide presentations act as a “visual background” to the presenter (Phillips, 2014). They don’t overshadow the whole purpose of the presentation, which is to hear the speaker.
Yesterday, I was on facetime with our good friends Chance and Brandi. They have a seven-month-old named Kinsely who is the most beautiful, perfect baby I’ve ever seen. (I may be a biased aunt.) When I asked them how they were, Chance said that Kinsley was “doing this weird thing” where she screamed any time they left the room without her. Immediately, I pictured a pinwheel. You see, in the video How Presentation Zen Fixed My Bad PowerPoints (Gonzalez, 2013), the presenter demonstrated as she edited her slides from a list of bullet points to images with meaning.
Images from How Presentation Zen Fixed My Bad PowerPoints (Gonzalez, 2013).
The best part is that I could share what I learned with my friends. I told them that she hasn’t developed object permanence. When they leave the room, her baby brain thinks that they no longer exist. Also, my metacognition allowed me to recognize that I learned this because the slideshow was more meaningful with imagery than the list of bullet points. I am anecdotal evidence that Gonzalez’s (2013) slideshow improvements worked! Finally, I ensured them that this was a phase as babies develop object permanence around eight months.
In his TEDTalk How to Avoid Death by PowerPoint, David Phillips (2014) creatively demonstrated tips for a good slideshow. He said to keep your messages to one message per slide (Phillips, 2014). If there is more than one message, we only pay attention to one of them. Next, he said to include short, sweet bits of text and an image (Phillips, 2014). Regarding size, the most important part of your slide should be the biggest (Phillips, 2014). To demonstrate this, he changed the size of the heading and the body text, and my eyes followed the bigger item! He also said to use contrast to highlight certain parts of a table or slide (Phillips, 2014). Finally, he explained that the magic number of images or items to include on a slide is limited to six (Phillips, 2014). With six items, we just “see” them. After six, we must count the items to know how many there are. It was so fun to “watch” as my brain was tricked by his presentation. If you didn’t watch his video, find it here. It’s a must-see!
A New Bliss
What might it be like if adult learning looked like this? Maybe instead of a room full of colleagues learning the same information, you attend a brief meaningful introduction that lasts fifteen minutes. In that time, you are inspired by a story that pulls on your heartstrings and sets the tone for the day. Then you and a handful of colleagues discuss specific data and lessons in a guided PLC. Next, maybe you watch a mentor teacher teach a lesson that you need some help with. When you ask a question, she tells you to come back next period to teach the same lesson to the next group of kids. Then, she gives you feedback specific to you in a format designed by professionals. Finally, you end your day back in a PLC where you discuss and write to connect and reflect. Over the course of the next few weeks, a coach meets with you to continue to help you grow in specific, measured ways.
Meaningful, individualized professional learning is possible. The gap between what is and what could be is achievable.
References
Duarte, N. (2010). Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences. Wiley.
Duarte, N. (2010, December 10). TEDxEast – Nancy Duarte Uncovers the Common Structure of Greatest Communicators 11/11/2010. YouTube. Retrieved April 2, 2022, from https://youtu.be/1nYFpuc2Umk
Duarte, N. (2013, March 21). Nancy Duarte: How to Tell a Story. YouTube. https://youtu.be/9JrRQ1oQWQk
Gonzalez, J. (2013, September 16). How Presentation Zen Fixed My Bad PowerPoints. YouTube. https://youtu.be/vkrl1j0IW-c
Gulamhussein, A. (2013). Teaching the Teachers Effective Professional Development in an Era of High Stakes Accountability. Center for Public Education. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j13c5mk092kmqv9/Teaching_Effective_Professional_Developmt.pdf?dl=0
Phillips, D. J. (2014, April 14). How to Avoid Death By PowerPoint | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholmSalon. YouTube. https://youtu.be/Iwpi1Lm6dFo
TNTP. (2015). The Mirage. TNTP. https://tntp.org/assets/documents/TNTP-Mirage_2015.pdf