by Norman Eng
Is it a theory? A problem? A how-to?
Now think about a concrete opening hook that helps students see the usefulness of your topic. Forget the actual terms and vocabulary or any of the technical stuff. How can you turn that topic into something students will care about? That's Connecting.
Next, the Instruction (the "I" in CIA). Here's where you go into the lecture. The terms. The heavy lifting, so to speak. After discussing the pros and cons of a practical versus intellectual education, you might transition into the instruction by saying:
"The current focus on job skills is actually rooted in Aristotle's work. You're probably thinking, 'How are the two possibly related?' Let's start by exploring two philosophies: realism and idealism . . ."
Now it's appropriate to discuss terms and specifics. The audience learns better when you anchor new knowledge with something familiar—in this case, the current education approach.
The audience learns better when you anchor new knowledge with something familiar.
Students have more context to understand terms like realism, metaphysics, and idealism. They aren't sitting in a vacuum. Now they're more receptive to the technical stuff. Here's where I might use the slides from Option 1:
I might add a quote or two and get students involved. More importantly, I recommend interspersing the lecture with student involvement, whether via questions or group work. One activity I absolutely love is stop-jot-share, the learning technique described in Chapter 4. It helps students actively retrieve information that's been presented.
With stop-jot-share, students get a chance to write down everything that's been discussed in their notes—a summary of sorts that can help them for the final exam. Furthermore, you won't feel as much of a need to provide a copy of your slide deck.
Here's a BEFORE (original slide) and AFTER (a redesigned version) below. Note the left side is the slide, and the plan of action is on the right):
BEFORE:
AFTER:
As you can imagine, there are many ways to teach students about realism. Other ideas include having students analyze videos, articles, and quotes.
Notice a few things?
First, the new way takes longer to present. But this isn't a problem—if the idea is worth teaching, it will take time. Otherwise, don't include it in your PowerPoint. Learning is a sense-making process. Give audiences time to "struggle" with the content.
Learning is a sense-making process. Give audiences time to "struggle" with the content.
Second, notice that slides play a secondary role to your purpose— as they should. CIA focuses on what would get students from point A (not knowing) to point B (knowing). Everything else acts as support (just as visuals do for the narrator in a documentary).
Finally, see how interaction (the stuff in the diamond) plays a big role? It's incorporated into the beginning, middle, and end. Getting audiences to participate regularly should be part of your new "normal."
PRESENTING. THE BOTTOM LINE
Good design was never about making slides pretty.
It's about reducing the friction to understanding and learning.
It's about improving the overall user experience, the UX.
In many cases, simply distilling your ideas and distributing them across multiple slides will fix a lot of your PowerPoint problems.
But real design goes beyond cosmetic. Questioning assumptions and conventions are more important.
What if simply showing a title and three bullet points is not the best way to communicate your point? What if a photograph, a quotation, a story, or an activity works better?
Now you're removing conventional constraints and developing solutions from scratch, just as innovators and "first principles" thinkers do.
Real design goes back to the fundamentals and solves problems.
When you do that, you create the ultimate user experience.
33 We often overestimate what audiences know, because what's new to them is often basic to us. This "expert blind spot" is a major reason why presenters (and teachers) lose their audiences. Furthermore, the more knowledge one accumulates, the more he or she should beware of this phenomenon. I frequently have to check myself to see if I've assumed too much about my audience's existing knowledge of a topic.
34 Note, however, that when an audience has "bought into" the premise of your message—as students might listening to your inside scoop to landing a great job—you can get more detailed. They'll listen and work through your slides once the initial message makes it past the gatekeeper and into the rationally thinking part—the neocortex. Staying engrossed in a ninety-minute podcast or a three-hundred-page book therefore won't be a problem. At the same time, don't overstay your welcome; an invitation to continue doesn't give you license to keep talking or stuff your slide with content. Staying attuned is part of the challenge.
35 Nina Kim also advised and designed this book as well.
36 Think of the micro type used in the legal disclosures of print pharmaceutical ads. Its size indicates it's not meant to be read. The lower level of importance explains why footnotes tend to use smaller type sizes.
37 A case can be made to distill the on-screen text even more. Perhaps there's some friction in having to read the entire sentence. Here, I try to remember marketer Seth Godin's (n.d.) golden rule: No more than six words per slide. Hard to do? Sure, but not impossible.
38 The latter is part of the 10/20/30 rule popularized by marketer Guy Kawasaki: Have no more than ten slides, speak for no more than twenty minutes, and make sure the type size is at least thirty points. (For the record, the number of slides doesn't matter; it's what you do with them that counts.)
39 In marketing and advertising parlance, the "hero shot" refers informally to the main or most important visual that represents your brand/ product. On a website page, the hero shot is often the first and largest photo that readers see as they scroll.
40 ShapeChef has a step-by-step process here: https://www.shapechef.com/blog/how-to-create-a-spotlight-effect-in-powerpoint
41 See Snow (2015), who tested the reading grade level of some of the most popular books of all time, including J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (~5th - 6th grade) and Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (4th grade).
42 See https://youtu.be/0JQXoSmC1rs (Malek, 2016)
43 For details, watch Musk's thinking process as explained by Steve Jurvetson, partner at Silicon Valley venture firm DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson): https://youtu.be/3aXNWGwis4w (DraperTV, 2015).
44 Other than curating content, the other major role presenters play is to design experiences that help the audience understand what you're communicating. For teachers, this may be learning experiences such as group work, class discussions, and class debates. For conference presenters, this may be case studies, anecdotes, Q&A, surveys, and other ways to make information more concrete or get audiences to engage. Curating content and designing learning experiences lay at the heart of Option 2.
06
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q. I have way too much to cover. I can't just focus on one message as you recommend—what should I do?
A. First, it's critical to remind yourself how the human brain works. The fact is, it finds ways to ignore messages— particularly if they are boring, irrelevant, unclear, or simply too much—so that it can conserve calories and save energy. Because of this, your average audience member will lose focus after fifteen to twenty minutes.
But I understand that at times presenters have no choice but to cover a lot; without the full amount of content, students/attendees cannot move forward. For example, my education undergrads have to pass a rigorous teacher-performance assessment (called the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment, or edTPA) to get their license. It involves four tasks, divided into eighteen subtasks, requiring candidates to plan lessons, videotape their teaching, analyze students' work, and so forth. Each subtask has its own requirements regarding page length, format, etc. I, as presenter,
have to give students a breakdown of the whole damn thing—step-by-step: What do you do first? Second? Third? Last?
You probably have something similar. Maybe you have to explain all the nerves and muscles in the human body, the inner workings of a combustion engine, or how a balance sheet works. And you know there's simply no getting around it.
First, remember the D&D rule from Chapter 5 (i.e., Distill and Distribute). We must always strive to develop one idea per slide, rather than several. Fine—what else? you ask.
If the audience has some background on the topic—for example, they read a chapter on the nervous system last week—then begin the presentation by activating their prior knowledge. Don't jump into lecturing just yet, as that would instantly turn students into passive learners.
How do you activate prior knowledge? Any number of ways will work. Here are two ways I do this:
Method #1: Affinity Mapping. I have students create an affinity map, a project-management technique where groups of four to five students write down everything they know (or remember) about a topic on sticky notes. For instance, if the topic is the nervous system, students may decide to jot down terms like brain, spinal cord, and nerves. They may even write down pieces of information like "The spinal cord is responsible for transmitting information via nerve impulses to the brain." Sticky notes can then be grouped by categories like central nervous system and peripheral nervous system. (It's up to students to define these groups.)45
Priming students through a retrieval and sense-making process allows them to better grasp the content.
Method #2: K-W-L Chart. A popular grade-school technique, K-W-Ls encourage audiences to activate their prior knowledge of a topic and take ownership of their learning. K-W-L stands for:
What You Know
What You Want to Know
What You Learned
Let's say nursing students need to know the four-step nursing process to ensure the quality of patient care—i.e., the assessment phase, the diagnosing phase, the planning phase, and the implementing phase. Slides are an efficient tool here; before you present, however, start with a K-W-L chart. First, ask them what they already Know (the "K" in the K-W-L). This can be done in small groups or as a class. Write students' responses on the board. Then ask them what they Want to know (the "W") regarding that topic: questions, wonderings, etc.
Examples:
What am I allowed (and not allowed) to ask patients?
Can I talk with others about my experiences with patients?
What if a patient argues and becomes belligerent?
Isn't this much better than jumping right into the presentation? Now students have a stake—ownership—in their learning. Only at the end will students address the "L" from the K-W-L, by summarizing what they Learned about the nursing process.
Affinity mapping and K-W-L charts are just two ways to address content-heavy presentations. As long as you prime audiences upfront, they will be more receptive to the lecture.
But what if your audience comes in cold, with little background knowledge? I'm betting they will still be able to contribute upfront. Even with pitches or, say, an introduction to new technology at a conference, you can find ways to involve the audience. Maybe start by asking about problems or issues they encounter related to your pitch or solution. Here's where you earn your keep. Get creative. How can you set up the audience—and yourself— for success?
Make every presentation less about "disseminating information" and more about connecting. Building a dialogue. That's powerful communication!
As for the presentation itself, here are five other recommendations to improve the user experience when you simply must deliver lots of content. (I assume at this point you have already done your best to distill the content from each slide and distribute them across multiple slides—the D&D rule described last chapter.)
1. At the start, include an agenda of major topics covered as a preview. Attendees hate not knowing how much you cover. Part of communicating effectively is the ability to manage expectations. If possible, provide the agenda separately and beforehand (perhaps via a handout or written on the side of the board, or even as the first slide audiences see as they walk in), so that you can jump right into the opening hook. You don't want to waste the precious first few minutes (where audience attention is at its highest) by "going over" what you're about to present: "OK, let's start with today's agenda . . ." Nope.
2. For each new section of your presentation, use "roadmaps" so audiences get a sense of where you are. Roadmaps help audiences see the forest (the big picture) beyond the trees (the details). It also addresses the "Are we almost done yet?" question that invariably creeps up during content-heavy sessions.
In the two examples below, notice how the word Assessing is highlighted in black, whereas the rest of the words are set in gray.
Two ways to show audiences they are entering the third section of the presentation
3. Every ten minutes or so, break up the monotony by involving the audience in some way, whether through activities or even simply asking them questions. I prefer those which involve every attendee, not just a few. Quizzes are one the best ways to do this, especially when you ask audiences to respond using their digital devices (smartphone, tablet, or laptop). See Chapter 4 on using Quizlet or Pear Deck. When I conduct workshops on teaching, I have faculty members apply the content to their own classroom for every major topic I present. And then they share.
4. For each point you present, relate back to the Why, as in Why does it matter? The one-sentence takeaway from Chapter 2 should help. If I present an education theory, for instance, I connect that theory to how it helps my students become effective teachers. Tying back to the purpose is even more critical with content-heavy presentations. Yet most presenters don't talk about this until the very end. That's a big mistake, considering how often the audience's brains tunes out. As presenters, we have to constantly remind the audience why they're there. Relate to the Why regularly—in every slide, if appropriate.
5. Build anticipation for something that comes at the end. In one of my education lectures, I told students, "As we go over the details of the teaching profession, think about why you want to become a teacher. At the end, you'll have a chance to post your thoughts on Twitter!" In this way, you've said something unexpected and/or intriguing that gets audiences to invest in your presentation while enticing them to remain engaged—a kind of suspended hook!
I'm not necessarily talking about prizes and other gimmicks that offer little incentive to listen to the actual presentation.
It's better to provide tips, secrets, and other hacks to help attendees leverage your content. And, yes, technically the "threat" of giving students a quiz at the end of class will keep students' attention, but it won't build positive anticipation. (As a rule, I use quizzes informally to check in on students, not as a way to hold their attention hostage.) The better choice is to use something they will find helpful.
Q. Should I give audiences a copy of my slide deck (i.e., a leave-behind)?
A. It's possible your students expect a copy of your lecture/ presentation. Maybe the conference requires you to upload a copy to their website, or maybe you want everyone to have one.
As a general rule, I try not to provide a copy of my slide deck. You know, the ones that look like these:
I know it's hard not to provide leave-behinds. I still do it sometimes. But if you've done your PowerPoint right— meaning you're using lots of visuals and minimal text, as in a documentary—then providing a copy is meaningless. Especially to those who weren't present to hear you speak. Who would ever understand a bunch of pictures? That's what I tell audiences at my workshops.
Remember the Redundancy Test from the Introduction of this book: If your slide deck is basically your lecture, then you've failed. The best ones cannot stand on their own—they merely support you. You are the star attraction.
If you've done your PowerPoints right—meaning you're using lots of visuals and min
imal text, as in a documentary—then providing a copy is meaningless.
The goal is for students (or audiences in general) to learn, take notes, reflect—i.e., make sense of things— during your presentation. They're not passive recipients of information, waiting for your notes so they can parrot them for the final exam.
But if you have to give a content-heavy presentation, a content-heavy slide deck is inevitable. Go ahead, then. Give copies of your slide deck. They're going to need the reference. You have my permission.
But I would add one critical caveat: If you give audiences a leave-behind, make sure they have an opportunity to retrieve that information. Especially if they're students.
In other words, don't just give content and be done with it. That encourages passive learning—the kind students will instantly forget. Instead, have them repeat (or paraphrase) that information during the course of the presentation. This means after ten to fifteen minutes of lecturing/presenting, ask students to write down everything that was just discussed, to summarize it. This forces them to retrieve information from their brain—an important learning process discussed in Chapter 4. I recommend the stop-jot-share technique.
Again, try to avoid giving audiences your slide deck. I would prefer you provide a one to three paragraph summary of the presentation as a leave-behind (i.e., a slightly more detailed abstract). This is perfect for conferences and meetings. And it discourages students from missing class just because they can always read the slides later on.
The alternative is to provide an outline of the major topics you discuss with blank spaces for note-taking during the actual presentation. I like the Cornell method of taking notes,46 which encourages students to pull out key ideas and summarize the lecture, as this template to the right illustrates.
STOP AND WATCH
For a primer on how to take Cornell notes, watch this short video (5:26): https://youtu.be/WtWglyE04OQ