Goodbye.pptx: Why I've Abandoned PowerPoint
How was PowerPoint impacting my teaching and why I rely on little more than a pen, visualiser and paper.
A while ago, I posted about the importance of centralising lessons. I spoke alignment, the need to reduce the teacher workload and how the PowerPoint is not the lesson, the teacher is.
Whilst yes, I still do agree with most of these points, recently I have been leaning more on that final point than many of the others.
How I Used to Use PowerPoint
In almost every department I have worked in, we have begun the process of centralising resources. This is an enormous undertaking for any department. Collating resources, getting the right set of questions, choosing a particular design, and curating the backdrop for a well structured lesson.
In my current school, we inherited a curriculum and morphed it for our pupils in our school. Our Do Nows became centralised. All lessons contain the same I Do, We Do, You Do format. Regular checks for understanding are scattered throughout, answers to questions found in our booklets. Even our models and scaffolding became centralised to ensure that the baseline for each lesson was a bloody good one.
The PPTs we have made, in my opinion, are spot on. Pupils make good progress, ideas and information is chunked, MWB tasks are scattered throughout, and a ton of independent practice is built in.
Teachers are told that these resources are a not a one-size-fits-all approach and that there may be some classes, either top or bottom sets, that require more challenge or more support, for example, and that they must therefore adapt these lessons for their individual classes. On the whole, this did occur.
What we have is working. Pupils test scores are up year on year, lessons are regularly updated with better questions and models, but I started to feel that we were losing something. This was not, as some people often argue, teacher autonomy (please see my post on centralising resources here), but on the impact a teacher can make with nothing but a pen.
Why I Felt Like It Wasn’t Working
I am still an ardent believer in centralising. This reduces workload, reduces the stress on teachers and can ensure a consistent approach to learning across a department.
But for me, I felt like I, the teacher, wasn’t the most important resource in the room, my PPT was.
The pupils get X, but I have a MWB check here or a set of questions there. I might as well do it. I have a few things I could cover in this section, but I would need to edit the PPT. The pupils could do with learning this here, it makes a good link, but I have to edit the PPT. Pupils need this scaffold for this question… off to edit the PPT.
Every individual change I wanted to make to the lesson would resort in me spending my time making and editing. All for the sake of having a structure to follow.
Now, this is not a new feeling.
Back at the start, during my PGCE, the PPT was my lesson. It told me when to do X, I could keep my timings straight in my head, I was able to stop, click back, and reteach when pupils just weren’t getting it. I even had to send them to my tutor so they could check them beforehand. I was nothing without my crutch.
I thought, at the time, that everyone had a PPT. Go into a classroom and there it is in all its glory. Every teacher with delightful animations, videos embedded and pictures to accompany ideas. I had actually been teaching for almost 4 years before I heard of a single teacher not using it.
Adam Boxer has a brilliant blog post on how he uses OneNote and why he doesn’t use PowerPoint anymore, some of which has guided my view on abandoning it. You can read it here.
Since then, I have wanted to make the plunge but our department was starting from scratch. A set of booklets given to us, a format we all used, and a curriculum we must follow. There was a ton of work to do to ensure all teachers, regardless of their specialism, were able to teach the lessons and teach them well. For some departments, this is where they are now. The work is getting the department up to a level to where you believe the teaching is top notch, and sometimes that does require ardent checking of centralised PPTs.
But as of late, we are in a good spot. We’ve had our resources pretty much done for over a year now and ironically, I have just not been using them. I’ve relied on little more than a visualiser, a purple pen and a pupil exercise book.
What I Do Now
Whilst this post has been about getting away from PPTs, I do still use it in a very limited capacity.
Last year, we stopped centralising our Do Nows, mainly to ensure they were good for the gaps within our individual classrooms, and this means I have a single set of PPT slides that I edit for my Do Nows. Additionally, all of our lessons, across the school, have a starter slide with the title, date, lesson objective, key vocab etc on them (school policy), but besides that, I do not use PPT at all.
I wrote in my last post about how I plan for my lessons. This has now become the backbone of my lessons. I have written out all of the knowledge I want the pupils in the room to grasp. Written out some potential MWB questions and the pages that I would want the pupils to complete in their booklets for independent practice.
In the lesson, I place the Do Now on the board, complete in in 7 minutes max, put on the starter slide and ask the pupils to write down the date and title. I switch to my visualiser and write. Most of my lessons now look like this:
Written notes
Pastors Perch
Pose questions for MWB
Reteach if required
Written notes
Pastors Perch
More MWB
Independent practice of booklet questions
If there is a class that needs some support, I write this on the questions in their booklet. Any key words I want them to know, they go on the whiteboard. Any etymology I want to go through, this is highlighted and annotated in their notes. Some additional information I want them to know, this goes in their written notes.
That’s it. No fanfare, no fancy animations, not editing. Nothing.
Sometimes, I will attempt a drawing, but my art skills do often fail me so I will print out a sheet for the pupils to save them the horror of discerning between a cow and a tree when I am teaching the carbon cycle.
Why This Is Working
The main reason I think this is working is that my pace is now determined, not by my PPT, but instead by gauging the students.
For example, last week I was teaching pressure in solids to my top set Year 8 pupils. They went through that lesson in no time. I knew they would. What I used to do was get more and more questions for the pupils to answer to fill the time because, well, that lesson was pressure in solids… why would I do anything else.
But now, if I see the pupils get it, why not move on. I have my notes, I’ve planned it, why can’t I just move onto the next lesson? Because that’s a separate PPT?
Since I started as a teacher, I have been conditioned to think that every lesson is a new lesson. That I have 60 minutes to teach it in and then 60 minutes to teach the next thing. But now, I now see a bunch of content I want the pupils to know, and the number of hours I have to do this in.
If I am teaching B2 Organisation, I used to have 20 individual lessons to teach this in, but now, I have 20 hours to teach Organisation.
This may seem just semantics, but it is a fundamental change in my perception of a lesson. If I have taught plant organisation, questioned the pupils, gave them independent practice, I know, that in the 15 minutes I have remaining, I can move on to plant tissues. Will I get through plant tissues in 15 minutes? No. But they come in the next lesson, and we continue.
Every teacher at the start of their career, or even 10 years into it, has thought “oh I didn’t get through this in that lesson” but I don’t. Who cares if it took my class a little longer than a hour to understand the components of blood? It just means that concept has taken a little bit more of a chunk of my 20 hours than I thought it would.
Can Everyone Do This?
When I have spoke to other teachers about teaching without a PPT, the biggest issue they mention is about those who are not confident in everything they need to know, this is a subject knowledge issue.
The most important part of the teacher’s repertoire is their subject knowledge. The better it is the more they can go deeper into the knowledge, the clearer their explanations, and the easier they will find it to move away from the crutch of a PPT.
The Importance of Subject Knowledge - Royal Society of Chemistry
But if a teacher has good subject knowledge, a good visualiser (get an ipevo) and a pupil’s exercise book, then there is nothing stopped them from cutting the cord.
If you find yourself more worried about the transition on slide six than the misconception, the learning or your explanation, it might be time to pick up the pen, turn on your visualiser, and just teach.
A special shout out to Adam Boxer, James Dyke, Claudia Lewis, Adam Robbins and others for validating my thinking on this.
Very nice. Only way it could be better is if you used carousel for your Do Now ;)
Been on the same journey Joel - although a few ppts hang on, more out of sentimentality than anything!