The Gift of Other People’s Time

Some thoughts on presentations.

Note: As per last week’s post, I’ve barely made it in by my usual deadline, which should give readers some idea of what this week has looked like. But I did it, so that’s progress!

I gave a presentation to my Board of Education this week. We are doing something interesting with textbooks in our Middle School Science courses, and because it involves several, rather abrupt, changes to the normal way that we have done business to this point, my Superintendent was gracious enough to ask me to take the lead on letting our Board of Ed. know what was going on.

Here’s the presentation. Feel free to click through it if you’d like. This piece is not about the substance of what’s inside it, but instead on what it is: A presentation, carefully and deliberately made to be worth looking at. I know this presentation served that purpose because audience members told me as much after I delivered it. A colleague said that it was “the most interesting presentation he had ever seen about a boring topic.” A Board of Education member told me that it “set the bar.” I don’t put those comments here to brag (well, I probably do a little bit), but to make the point that, content aside, this was a pleasant presentation experience for my audience. Which is not something that we always see in the world of education presentations. So often presentations seem to serve a role of information-dump for the presenter. Slides are too dense and too dull to keep the attention of the audience. It’s this last part that is the real problem for me: People’s time and attention is a gift, and if you are going to occupy it, you owe it to them to treat it as such.

So with that in mind, here are some tips that you can keep in mind when creating presentations that will help you make them the best they can be:

1. Use the right tool for the right purpose. The historical use of a slide deck is to supplement the speaker. Slides come from a “pitch” culture in business where the purpose is to make an argument. Almost every issue that I see with presentations comes from the presenter losing this focus and trying to use the deck for a different purpose (usually presenting information to the audience) without consciously considering how best to accomplish that task. Here’s a good rule of thumb: If the information can be presented to your audience with images/graphics, slides are great for that (this is the “pictorial superiority effect”). If the information needs to be presented textually, slides are significantly less good for that.
2. Severely limit information density on slides. Using slides to present textual information can be done, but once you are putting more than one thought on a slide, you are better served doing something else. Here are two easy options: Use more than one slide to get back to the “one thought per slide” rule, or (often better) put all of your thoughts on a handout that you give to your audience. In the case of this week’s presentation, I provided the members of the Board of Ed. with a short proposal paper, outlining what our plan looked like in MUCH greater detail than what I put on these slides. In fact, I bet that without that proposal, you only get a skeletal sense of what my textbook plan is from the slides. Which is deliberate. Slide decks should really only make sense in the context of a presentation. There is no reason why a deck that would make total sense to someone clicking through it without me talking about it should be as useful as a presentation aide as one that was created expressly to supplement my presentation. In my experience, this seems to be a standard error: People try to put too much information in their decks, which renders both the presenter and the deck less useful.
3. Plan your presentation structurally. Most solid presentations seem to outline what is going to happen during the presentation up front (the “talk map”) and then returns to the map as the presenter moves through the presentation. The purpose here is to give the presentation structure. Structure is incredibly important for learning. The human brain seems to be primed to use structures for building c.... Just like it’s not possible to deliver a great lesson without a clear structure for learners, it’s similarly impossible to do so for a great presentation.
4. Plan your presentation aesthetically. Almost as important as #3; your presentation should have a unified style. Depending on your experience with design, this might be the most frightening point I’m making here, but it shouldn’t be. Here’s the only thing you ever need to remember about design: Simplicity is key. The presentation from this week has one font that exists at only four different sizes throughout the presentation (and is almost entirely 2 of those four). It uses the colors black, white, and blue for every element that I placed onto the slides that is not a picture. Every element that I use on the slides is there for a purpose. I don’t have anything that only exists because it “looks cool,” or “grabs your attention”. Hopefully some elements fit under both descriptors, but that’s not why they are there. This is not graduate-level design sense (actually it kind of is, but not because it’s fancy or elaborate). That’s not too scary, is it?
5. Respect your audience. I know I said it at the top, but it’s so important that it bears repeating. Assume your audience is as intelligent as you are. Use the time that they have given you efficiently. Ask them questions, and challenge them to think about things in new ways. Let them ask you questions. Do the kinds of things that demonstrate that you respect the people you are speaking with and that you are grateful for the opportunity. This probably includes practicing what you are going to say and how you are going to say it. You don’t have to get it down to theater-level memorization, but you should give it a good think-through before you stand up to say your piece. After all, if you think about the terrible presentations that you’ve been made to sit through, haven’t the biggest problems come from a lack of thought and attention? Break that cycle by modeling an alternative.

Obviously, these are just a few, big, thoughts on how to create and deliver effective presentations. And honesty demands that I clearly state that none of them are my own. There’s an entire rabbit-hole of presentation design work that has been done by many, many people, and if you are interested enough to care, you should check some of it out. Just be careful: Once you start thinking about this stuff, it’s going to affect your thoughts about presentations, both for how you give them and how you receive them. So be warned, but also be kind! Almost no one who’s standing in front of a slide deck has ever really thought about how best to go about it. So you can’t really blame them for doing it wrong.

Thanks for reading! Was anything in the above interesting, or problematic, or tangentially related to something that you’d like me to know more about? Drop me a line and tell me what it is. Discourse is crucial for improvement!