The Explanatory Power of PowerPoint
Jeff Young’s recent Chronicle article, “When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” has sparked a great deal of discussion in various online forums. The article profiles the recent decision of José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University, to remove computers from the classrooms in his school. He has encouraged his faculty to move away from canned PowerPoint lectures and toward more low-tech, interactive methods of teaching.
While I’m all for more interactive teaching methods, I thought I might share a few thoughts in defense of PowerPoint and other slideware technologies, in part because I think they can be very effective instructional tools. For example, here’s a piece of a recent presentation I gave:
To introduce some of the research from How People Learn on the differences between experts and novices, I first had my workshop participants watch a short clip from The Devil Wears Prada that illustrates many of those differences in the context of the fashion industry. After watching the clip, we had a great discussion exploring those differences and other aspects of teaching and learning raised by the clip. Then I shared a few PowerPoint slides that featured short sentences and striking images designed to illustrate the points I wanted to make about experts, in the style of Presentation Zen.
Following are a few thoughts about this kind of use of PowerPoint:
First, I’ll note that there seems to be small, but growing, group of people in non-academic settings who refer to themselves as “explainers.” These include Paddy Hirsch, who explains financial terms on the Marketplace Whiteboard video podcast; Tom Harris, who runs the Explainist blog; and Lee and Sachi LeFever, who, as CommonCraft, produce amazingly clear short videos that explain technology “in plain English.” I’ve been taken by how these and other individuals use words and visuals to explain complicated technical topics.
Second, I’ve also found myself frequently referencing Schwartz and Bransford’s “time for telling” idea. (Schwartz, D. L., & Bransford, J. D. (1998). A time for telling. Cognition & Instruction, 16(4), 475-522.) This is the idea that if students are ready–cognitively and motivationally–to hear an explanation, then they’re much more likely to benefit from that explanation. Often, for instance, in classroom settings, it’s better to lead with an example or case study that interests students and grounds a discussion in the concrete before explaining the relevant to theory to students. This is counter-intuitive to a lot of academics, who are usually comfortable starting with theory and then moving to examples. A well-chosen example or case study, however, can help create a “time for telling” in which students want to hear an explanation and are prepared to understand it.
What do these two points have to do with PowerPoint? I’ve talked with many instructors who feel very comfortable using PowerPoint and with others who feel some sense of pressure (from peers, from students, from administrators perhaps) to use it to make their lectures more engaging. For either kind of instructor, it can be useful to help them think about using PowerPoint in more constructivist ways–using it as an explanatory tool once a “time for telling” has been created, as I did in the presentation above. Clicker questions can often help generate “times for telling,” setting the stage for students to benefit from a well-designed PowerPoint explanation.
I’m in the faculty development business, so I’m often thinking about ways to meet faculty where they are and help them consider teaching choices they might not have considered before. Given the prevalence of PowerPoint, it can offer a great starting point for discussions of pedagogy with faculty members.