The Powerpoint years
Creating presentations were great for organising my thinking while I planned, I could include:
Exactly the right picture that I wanted, in the order that I thought was best.
Questions that I had thought up, and add mark schemes. Again, at the right moment of the lesson.
Notes to myself on something to say, or something to watch at the right point.
I could develop them over years and not worry about forgetting my thoughts, and sequence or reorder lessons easily by just changing the order of the presentations in their folders. These folders of Powerpoint presentations represented my curricula. I thought I'd never stop using them.
The Transition
Twitter brought me to the attention of an alternative; drawing your lessons. At first the transition began with having my PowerPoint presentations open on my laptop screen while I drew the key components of the lesson on the whiteboard.
As I did so, I began noticing how students were much happier with my explanations and followed them with more ease. However, while my presentation of the explanation had changed, the planned lessons remained the same as I followed my pre-designed lesson plans.
With the rise in popularity of the visualiser (on Twitter) I bought one for myself. The advantages of the visualiser go beyond what the whiteboard alone can offer due to the ability to project anything under the camera in addition to being able to draw your explanations. This includes student answers which I can mark with the class, for example.
And so the transition continued, now drawing my explanations on paper, but still following my Powerpoint presentations. The difference being that I could now sit and face my students and so more easily see and respond to their their gestures and facial expressions. Lessons flowed better.
Another change was the archiving of my lessons.
When I switched to drawing on the board I began to prefer my diagrams to the presentations. Bit by bit I was diverging from what was pre-planned on the Powerpoint slides. At the end of the lesson however, my thoughts and diagrams were lost, in stark contrast to the information in the Powerpoint presentations.
With the visualiser, at the end of a lesson I began taking a photo with the visualiser itself and inserting the image into the corresponding Powerpoint presentation.
So far, the ways of teaching were changing, but the Powerpoint presentation remained the source of thinking and information that persisted through time.
I was still tied to that way of thinking, the Powerpoint as the safety net, the record of thinking and successful lessons. But with a new alternative, I started to perceive differences.
I started to feel constrained by the Powerpoints. They influenced me to push forward through the slides in a linear fashion, urging me to keep momentum with previous thoughts.
But those thoughts were with different students, at different points in a course, and with previous ideas about pedagogy. Sometimes I’m not even sure what those thoughts were.
An urge arose to start drawing and questioning while completely ignoring the presentation.
Nevertheless, I would periodically search for an image in a corresponding Powerpoint and it would hook me in. It would linearise my thinking on my own previous plans rather than the students in front of me.
It was like an addiction. I just had to see what the next slides contained, leaving an imprint such that the lesson then followed that path; trading in my responsiveness to student understanding for pursuing my own previous thoughts.
It was this sensation that made me plan a permanent transition away from Powerpoint.
The visualiser years
To say that I had to plan this move is important. Powerpoint had given me a way to archive deep thoughts and thorough planning. If I really wanted to free myself during lessons, I needed a completely new system of storage. This system had to reflect my want for flexibility and responsiveness.
Rather than folders of Powerpoint presentations for each lessons, I now have each curriculum on a word document that gives a lesson order and the principal learning of each lesson. I also include here any essential media I want to show, but this is not so important to me anymore - more on this in a minute.
It looks like this:
Notice how one lesson doesn’t have any notes. This is typically because I know what I want to do, and I haven’t yet finished with transferring my entire system. I’ll do what isn’t urgent over time, maybe as part of my weekly planning.
Next, rather than planning by producing a Powerpoint presentation, I plan by drawing. This has helped me focus on exactly what I want my students to experience, the absolute essential things they must discern and see. Leaving the rest to responsive classroom dialogue and formative assessment.
A lesson plan looks like this:
Or like this:
Teaching via diagrams has a lot of evidence behind it for successful learning (see this book), and building planned diagrams with students helps manage their cognitive load and make features explicit to them.
Rather than having all my media, including the explanations, stored in individual Powerpoint slides, I switched to a decentralised indexing system.
All images are stored in one ‘images folder’, as are my case studies, essential videos, and lesson plans. Their file names have ‘tags’ so whenever I want something, or my students need to see something, I just put it into my computer’s search.
This has allowed maximum flexibility in the class; I’m not constrained by the linearity of a presentation, but can respond easily to the non-linearity of the classroom. I can pull up images and videos when I need them, when and where the necessity arises according to what students are discerning.
It also means that I only store the best resources and I have a relationship with the ones I have. When I need an image I don’t have, I just google it in the lesson.
It looks like this for my images:
And this for my lesson plans:
For formative assessment, I still use some exam questions, but I keep them in decentralised folders, pulling out the ones I want in the moment.
Furthermore, I have switched to using my own frameworks for formative assessment that are flexible enough to be used across all biology topics, freeing me from the constraints of not having a good GCSE style question for a specific concept.
Rather than having my core questions distributed over all my Powerpoint presentations, I have them printed for each class in a booklet, so they are always at hand for both students and I.
And so what are we left with? What are the similarities and differences with my old way of working with my new way of working?
Firstly, the similarities. What I got from Powerpoint, I still have. I have banked questions (with biology-specific frameworks, my core questions, and stored exam questions). I have my curriculum with the lesson objectives. I have my images, videos, my case studies, and planned explanations.
I still have that solace of knowing that I have resources. But it’s now decentralised, accessible, and flexible.
So what’s different? Planning time has reduced. This is confounded with being an experienced teacher, but I still think it has this effect. Notwithstanding, I have taught many new things this year with my IB courses and my GCSE courses, and really enjoyed planning this way. All my time was spent on thinking about what I wanted my students to experience in the lesson.
Rather than formatting a Powerpoint with all that entails (the right images, questions, in the right order), you just draw your explanation by hand. It’s much quicker. (I did try an ipad at this point, but I didn’t like drawing with it, and preferred my general system).
My students comment frequently on how much they appreciate my diagrams and how I build them with the class. They really perceive a difference between following and understanding the explanation of a concept this way compared to with a Powerpoint presentation.
They talk as if it is the diagram itself, but it isn’t just this. It’s also the freedom I’ve felt to think about what my students are thinking, exploring their ideas, and responding directly. Building the explanation with them.
I no longer feel like I am on a lesson path, but in a lesson with many students exploring many paths to a similar destiny of discernment of concepts. It's just the teacher and students negotiating and discerning meaning via dialogue and diagrams.
When I speak to some teachers about teaching by drawing I see that worry in their face. They suggest you must know your stuff inside out. Is that really the source of reticence, or is it the fear of going alone?
Just like when a pianist must stand to sing in front of the piano and is exposed to the audience. I understand that. But what more does Powerpoint add to the student-teacher dynamic? I still have a planned lesson, I just draw it. Three's a crowd, they say.
Final thoughts
This is not intending to be a generalisation across contexts, or a dogma. Many teachers will use Powerpoints in ways that suit them and their students. This is a reflection on my relationship with Powerpoint and visualisers in my lessons.
I’ve made the transition later in my journey as a teacher. Would I recommend it to younger teachers? Yes, because I believe it has made me a better teacher, and it is quicker to plan. (The caveat here is that the free and generous sharing of Powerpoint presentations often substituted planning entirely.)
When time is short, the essentials are the planning of the explanation, and the questions you’ll use. Images can be found via google during the lesson, and saved after each lesson for the future. If you’re really tight on time, even the explanation can be done on the spot in the lesson, saved, and then improved upon future lessons.
At least this way, the focus is on the explanation and the students, rather than following someone else’s presentation. And finally, not all at once! I transitioned my courses one-by-one. The key was starting. If you've liked this then check out my book. Download chapter 1 here—English edition—edición española—or check out my other posts.
@CMooreAnderson (twitter)
