One of the presentation "big whigs" should do some pd on how to create great presentations.

— Avery Pickford (@averypickford) April 16, 2016

Far too humble to nominate our own selves, Robert Kaplinsky and I nominated each other for the task and partnered up.

Robert offered advice on getting your NCTM proposal accepted by NCTM. (Proposals are due May 1!) I offered advice on how to present that session after it’s accepted.

I recommend the video of my half of our session because my presentations tend to move. However, you’re welcome to read my notes below.

In all of this, I am motivated by selfishness.

Of NCTM’s total membership, only a small fraction attend the national conference and only a small fraction of that fraction present there. The ideas that can push math education (and my own work) forward live inside the heads of people who really need to share them.

I will share some of my workflow and style choices with you but a lot of that is just how I present, not how you should present. I’ll offer only two words of advice that I think every single presenter should take seriously.

To preface that advice, I’d like you to make a list of what you like and dislike about presentations you attend. Keep that list somewhere in view.

When I asked that people on Twitter to make those same lists, I received several dozen responses, which I’ll summarize below:

(People really hate it when presenters read from slides, FWIW.)

Testify

My best advice to any new presenter is to “testify,” to prepare the kind of talk you’d want to see yourself. Your talk needs to include the features you like and it needs to not include the features you dislike. Anything less is a form of despair.

In every presentation I give, I’m trying to testify to these truths:

• I love this work. I need you to feel that.
• I think teaching is important work. Feel that too.
• But not so important we can’t laugh about it.

If you don’t leave one of my sessions feeling all of that, I have failed to testify to my ideals as a presenter.

So look at your lists. Do the stuff you like. Don’t do the stuff you don’t like. Let your presentation testify to your ideals. Be the presenter you want to see in the world.

Practice

The facts of the matter are that I have been a terrified and terrible presenter. I was homeschooled for K-8 so I wasn’t accustomed to giving regular academic presentations in front of peers. The first presentation I gave in my first year of public school was so lousy that its ending crashed into a wall of what would have been total silence if not for Drew Niccoll’s sarcastic slow clap.

“Great job, buddy!” he said, a line I still hear when the sun goes down and the lights go out.

Cut to 2017 and I have presented in all fifty states and a handful of continents and provinces.

All of this is to say, presentation skills aren’t biological. They’re practiced.

Teachers know this. You know how much better your fourth period lesson is than your first period. I’m on my eleventh period of the other talk I’m giving at NCTM. It looks nothing like the first time I gave it. So practice as much as you can. Present your talk at your school or district, your local affiliate, your state affiliate, at regional conferences — the same talk — before you present at the national conference.

That’s it.

Testify and practice. I think presenters would be more effective and audiences would be more satisfied and the world would be better if everybody did just that.

But the rest of this is advice I only give to myself. It’s the method I’ve used to prepare and deliver all of my presentations from the last five years. I only offer it in case it’s helpful to you as you think about your own process.

First, I wait a very, very long time to open up slide software.

I suspect that many novice presenters begin by opening PowerPoint. Me, I didn’t open Keynote until the week before my talk, about 90% of the way into my preparation.

Why? Two reasons. One, I want slide software to serve the ideas of my talk. Starting with slide software means my ideas start to conform to the limitations of slide software. Two, a lot of slide software encourages lousy presenting. If you add an extraordinary word count to a slide in PowerPoint, for example, the slide software responds by saying, “Sure, buddy. Lemme shrink the font up for you. Keep typing.”

Instead, I start by asking myself the following questions.

• What is your big idea?
• If your big idea is aspirin, then what is the teacher’s headache?
• If your big idea is the answer, then what is the question?

If you don’t have a big idea yet, ask yourself what you’re trying out in your classes that’s different and interesting to you. Zoom out a little bit and look again. Do you see trends and common features in what you’re trying? That’s where you’ll find your big idea.

The other questions try to focus you on the needs of your participants. How does your big idea respond directly to a felt question or need.

Once I can answer those questions, I set up a bucket in my head.

It’s important that I set that bucket up in my head as early as possible. The existence of the bucket tunes my eyes and mind to the world around me. I look at photos, student work, conversations, activities, handouts, YouTube videos, quotations, and academic papers differently. “Could this go in the bucket?” I ask myself.

This presentation was formed from the contents of a bucket that was a year old. I have buckets in my head that are older than that, preparation for NCTM 2019, for example.

I take the contents of the bucket and shape them into narration in Google Docs.

I don’t assume I’ll have any images. A lot of great speeches were given before the advent of slide software, right? Did “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” need bullet points? Would PowerPoint have done anything but harm the Gettysburg Address?

The biggest mistake I see novice presenters with slide software is to assume that what they say is what audience participants should see.

My survey participants said they hate that kind of design. Cognitive scientists have found that you disadvantage your audience when you make them hear and read the same text simultaneously.

Advantage your audience, instead, by finding evocative, full screen visuals that illustrate, rather restate your narration.

Only now, with my talk almost completely developed, do I fire up Keynote.

I create loads of blank slides. In a note on each slide, I write what the image will be. In the slide description, I copy over my narration.

That was all I had three days before this talk. Loads and loads of blank slides. For people who start with slide software, that probably sounds terrifying. Me, I knew I had already finished the talk.

Creating the images for this talk took about a day and a half.

Here is that day and a half compressed down to 17 seconds.

From there I rehearse.

My goal for rehearsal is that you’ll sit in my talk and within minutes say to yourself something like, “I guess this guy isn’t going to screw up that bad.”

When your anxiety is high, your ability to learn from your experience is low. My rehearsal is an effort at settling your anxiety so you can learn.

Neutralize your fear.

You’re nervous. I get that. You work comfortably in front of 40 middle-school students but you feel paralyzed in front of a room of half that many adults. I get that too.

I only know one way to neutralize my fear, and that’s through love.

Love of myself, love of my work, love of the people I get to work with. As they write in scripture, “Perfect love casts out fear,” and “Love covers a multitude of PowerPoint sins.” (Paraphrasing there.)

In my next post, I’ll offer the presentation advice I received from 14 of my favorite math education presenters. Until then, add your own best advice in the comments.

2017 Apr 21. Updated to add the link to advice from the 14 presenters.

Yikes.

I can’t remember the last time I was bored. Eighth grade, maybe. My to-do list brims at all times with 10% menial tasks (currently: vacuum, clean porch, wash car) and 90% creative stimuli (currently: a mograph slideshow, a 100+ item, intra-continental scavenger hunt [like this], any sentence beginning with “eventually” in the paragraph above).

It’d be easy to get depressed about all the fun to-do list entries I’m not getting around to except I remember real quickly that I’ve only forsaken them for other fun entries. Life seems to be a buffet line of excitement these past few years and my plate’s finite surface area doesn’t bug me so much. If this is adulthood, I’m in.

Anyway, ’til I get around to any of that, I need to fill in four gaps:

1. They took every handout packet. After the presentation, a participant asked for my copy of the handouts for a friend which seemed to justify the hours I sunk into those handouts. On the rare instance during the presentation that I felt composed enough to breathe and scan the participants, I noticed lots of scribbling, which was really fun.
2. I bought Kelly. From stockxpert, I think, or maybe iStockphoto. (Found her.)
   

   FlickrCC just ain’t the revolution you think it is. Any photographer who invokes Creative Commons has licensed you to use her photograph, but if the photographer herself hasn’t acquired model releases from every person in the photograph, you’re still in a world of legal hurt. And do you trust Flickr user sugarshaz that much?

   Especially, if you’re looking to take your presentation slides into wide release, onto Slideshare, into video, onto the national circuit (and if you aren’t that pumped about your content, why are you presenting at all?) legit content like Kelly is worth the two bucks she costs you.

3. I switched to Max halfway through, which was dumb. I invoked Kelly’s name constantly, constantly tapping that through-line. Then halfway through the handouts, during the assessment portion of our show, I swapped her for Max Fischer, which was a colossally under-thought choice. It woulda been the easiest and best thing to hold on to Kelly’s name. *forehead smack*
   
4. How to secure a friendly audience from the get-go:
   • I got there early, set my slides up in advance, and greeted the audience at the door.
   • The room was hot. I walked back into the room, apologized for the temperature, and said, “… but it’s only gonna get hotter in here once I get this presentation going.” I met their laughter with something like earnest befuddlement. “They told me to open with a joke,” I said. “So I did.” Self-deprecation is endearing to a certain point.
   • I asked about their day, about their program.
   • We bonded over mutual turn-ons / turn-offs.

     I asked, “Does anybody know what that font is on that syllabus?”. A girl in the back huffed instantly: “Comic Sans!” and it felt appropriate to give her the floor for a coupla seconds while she delivered a gasping critique.

     When we came to the fourth case study, I asked if anybody knew who Prezbo was and several participants identified his character from The Wire. No such thing as a lukewarm Wire fan and, particularly after its recent Emmy snub, we’ve only got each other now.

     

     These aren’t anything huge, nothing that’ll give a lousy presentation legs, but it’s good to keep an eye open for these entry points.

But we need to get it out there, out into the open, intervention-style, that 90% of the time we use bullets, we use them to help us remember our presentation. 90% of the time you throw up a slide like this:

It’s because it helps you keep your presentation on track.

But presentation is very nearly a zero-sum game: anything that makes your experience easier as a presenter makes the experience more difficult for your audience. Any weight you shoulder, whether you’re memorizing or note-carding your talking points, whether you’re doing more with your handouts than printing out slides six-to-a-page, makes your audience’s experience more rewarding.

So I move carefully, evaluating each slide, wondering inwardly if slide x benefits me or my audience ’cause very rarely is it both.

Slides are only here, in this specific presentation, because there are things I have to show. I bust these clichés up, many times, by deploying careful visuals, some of which I have to recreate. I have to show them math basketball, fake or legit, miscellaneous questions, the pentagon problem. I have to show them these things.

I have to show them Kelly.

Kelly is kind of the fulcrum of this whole presentation – the emblematic been-wrecked-by-eight-years-of-corny-instruction student.

Kelly-the-hypothetical-student raises all sorts of teaching challenges.

Kelly-the-presentation-slide raises two specific design challenges.

This would’ve been a mistake.

Seven out of ten presentations I’ve attended this year would’ve used Marlo over Kelly. Marlo’s tempting. A scowling African-American male would’ve set this thing off huge. Marlo’s got poverty, anger, and a debilitating social crowd to go along with his lousy edu-experiences. I could get up in front of fifteen new teachers, tell ’em, this is what you’re up against next year, and own the room for an hour.

But that would’ve been so sensational, so inaccurate, and so incomplete. You set the bar at Marlo, you’re setting the bar low. You’re saying, we’re pitching these cliché busters at the multiple-suspension crowd.

Which we are.

But that would absolve a lot of teachers – teachers who teach kids who look nothing like Marlo – of any culpability here. Making Marlo my poster slide wouldn’t do justice to the truly terrifying fact that even discipline-lite students associate math with terrible clichés. Kelly’s smiling and happy but she hates your class. You set the bar at Marlo, you set the bar so low most of your attendees clear it before they sit down.

So we have Kelly.

Now why not this?

This approach is tempting ’cause I know I’m posting this on Slideshare later. But the sum is still zero. Nearly everything that makes my life easier makes my audience’s life worse. Here, specifically, I won’t type this text on the screen because I’m speaking it. Scientifically, asking your audience to read what you’re already saying generates intellectual static. Anecdotally, it’s annoying.

So I started developing two Keynote presentations side-by-side, koclive.key and kocweb.key. Nothing is easy.

The rest of the process, more or less:

1. I cmd-tab back and forth between my handouts and slides, making sure the slides track closely to the handouts.
2. I design individual slides to function first as still photos and then I spruce them up by adding some very basic animations (graphs drawing themselves across the screen, that sort of thing). My presentation would degrade insignificantly if I were forced to dig a Kodak slide projector out of my parents’ attic.
3. In terms of composition – why this line goes here instead of there, etc. – I have zero schooling. I just adjust, take a step back, adjust again, always trying to arrive at what’s clearest and prettiest.
4. I invest myself fully into consistency. I’ve kept font families intact throughout the entire presentation. Headlines in lowercase Arial Black. Body text in Tahoma. There’s an unobtrusive legend at the bottom-left of each slide connecting it to one of our five case studies. Same unassuming chalkboard background on every slide. Like last time, the goal of consistency is to make form invisible and content visible.
5. I dumped this slide:
   

   I realized it was only there to remind me how many nickels were stolen, which, again, was making my life easier at the expense of my audience’s.

6. No bullets. Forty slides. No bullets. Very little that’s worth saying can be disintegrated into staccato bullet points. If I ever found myself tending towards bullet points in any presentation, I’d start massaging them into an essay-style handout.

Here’s the complete slidedeck I’ll be presenting tomorrow. I hope that after all this it goes without saying that it’s pretty useless as a standalone file on the web.

But we’re in a really good place. Fact is, even at this premature point, given what we have, I’m pretty sure our presentation is untouchable. We’ve got great handouts and a coherent outline. (Though I only posted the brain-dump draft of the outline back there.)

But now we throw the outline away.

This is one of the most empathetic steps of this assignment. It’s the truest indicator of my devotion to my audience and their experience that I’m taking whatever I thought my presentation was about and dumping it.

All that matters right now is what my presentation looks like through the lens of their handouts.

If I stayed the course I originally charted, we’d get by. I’m sure we’d get by but the handouts would glom to the presentation loosely in maybe a dozen places. If I stayed the course I originally charted, I’d be saying, “You guys meet me here.”

But I want to meet them there.

And this is only because the weight of fifteen people offering me an hour of their time positively crushes me. If this audience were any bigger I’d find the responsibility overwhelming. I hope you feel the same way. So many speakers do not. They see the privilege as the audience’s which, in the design world, is like original sin.

So I outline again using the handouts as a guide. I ask the question, what would make the most sense to the audience given the direction of their handouts? I note down choice phrases I’d like to tie to a particular page. I sketch down visuals (but only those which are absolutely essential to point-making) for retrieval tomorrow when I build the slides.

The ideal process should look something like this. Pretty, right?

My process looks similar. Pretty, right?

Afterwards, I compare notes, check if I missed anything essential I can reincorporate painlessly. This is tabula rasa territory, though, and throwing away work is always painful, even for purposes as goodhearted as these.

We may have lost most presentation designers right here, in fact, ’cause when it comes to handout design most of them max out at hitting Print from PowerPoint’s file menu. These presenters take a low-resolution medium (PowerPoint slides; only a few lines permitted per slide) and port them to a high-resolution medium (paper; lots of lines permitted per page) without scaling up the content. An opportunity tragically missed.

Furthermore, lemme ask you, as a conference attendee, how many of those packets have you kept a day past the presentation? A year? We could work out some numbers real quick on the back of an envelope reflecting paper waste but the result, regardless of our estimations, is kinda sad, right? No one keeps those things.

I wanted to design something my audience would keep, something they’d use. I wanted the attendees to carry their handouts past the trash can propping open the door. I wanted them to reflect on their handouts often and, after finally internalizing their content decades later, hand them down to a younger teacher.

If you laugh I’ll get depressed again. Why should I aim any lower? Why would you aim any lower? What’s the point?

To accomplish this, I knew the audience had to build the handouts themselves, which isn’t the same as handing its members their own reams of blank legal. They needed lots of room to make the handouts their own, lots of blank space, but the blank space had to be carefully designed.

Two ways I could’ve blown this:

1. I could’ve thrown down the points I wanted to make and then subbed in blanks for key words. Churches do this a lot.
   

Sure, there are a lot of folks who take a lot of pride in keeping up with those blanks, but that approach doesn’t generate anywhere near the kind of ownership I needed or the presenter-audience chemistry I wanted.

2. I could’ve handed them a blank piece of computer paper and let them write what they wanted, which would’ve been inane also, but for more obvious reasons than my last hypothetical blunder.
   

   I mention it only to establish our extremes. Design equilibrium lies somewhere between handing them a blank slate and handing them a slide-for-slide PowerPoint printout.

So I needed to design a handout that encouraged them to work, that begged them to put their own words to my situations. It had to look good. My audience wouldn’t bring me anywhere near its best if I hadn’t reciprocated in advance.

So I thought hard about the handout’s function and the process was simple after that. I divided a piece of letter paper into three partitions. I took half the page to illustrate each cliché. I split the other half into quarters for the audience to a) identify the cliché and b) concoct a method for kicking it out of the classroom.

We’re tackling five clichés. Here’s one of them.

What I got right:

1. It would’ve been easy to leave the matter at white boxes for the cliché and its solution but, again, I wanted the design to be as inviting as possible, so I threw down some fine lines. (C – you reading this? That was you, girl.)
2. I used a landscape layout because half a landscape is basically portrait and I needed lots of portraits. (Serious bonus points if you know who Roland Pryzbylewski is and what he’s doing here.)
3. I coulda left it here too, five clichés and the solutions we constructed together. I was pretty sure if I facilitated things properly they’d walk away with a valuable document. Still I went ahead and threw on some assessment resources – completed tests, blank tests, blank concept checklists, templates galore – to complement the last and largest cliché. And with that, we’ve value-added these handouts to death.

One way I blew this:

1. I gave equal space to the cliché and its solution. Ethically, this bugs me. Equal space implies equal weight implies the cliché and its solution are doomed to this push-me-pull-you equilibrium when, in fact, it’s possible to demolish the clichés. It’s a subtle point but one which nagged me all morning. If you think these things don’t matter, you’re only mostly right. Problem is, these little sacrifices compound quickly until all you’ve got is a great design that could’ve been. Should been this, with the second half split along the golden ratio:
   

Please take final note of fonts, photos, and layout, all of which will resurface during the slide design part of our show. If you’ve stuck with us from the start, I hope you’ve noticed by now that with a good presentation absolutely nothing is easy.

I’ll leave you with the handouts:

For example, I wanted to discuss the cliché of good teachers assigning gross, indecipherable handouts to students and then expecting neat, decipherable work. That one’s several degrees off the trail, though, so I made sure to refresh our through-line immediately before and after it. It’s a dance. Leaving, returning. Expanding, retracting. You’re flirting with the through-line the whole way through.

This whole step would go without saying except so often it’s our tendency to build our presentations from the PowerPoint Keynote slides up. But Keynote has an immoral tendency to linearize complicated arguments, to break good thought into retarded bullet points. Keynote is still a couple days out.

Here is my brain dump, everything that struck me as interesting or worth sharing, listed in bullet points that do not proceed orderly from one to the next:

• Bring in Wire clips / Bueller Bueller / Chalk?
• Start from small to big.
• comic sans
• list 5 pejoratives
• seek out cliche and destroy it
• fake or legit
• we’re not talking about canceling class or throwing a party
• comic sans
• worksheets poorly designed
• teachers boring, obsessed w/ problem sets
• interested only in math
• assessments are a thing to dread
• cliché case files
• totally incomprehensible test (what is your score? what should my reaction be here? 2 triangle 2 triangle is an operation 5Q fast test)
• this is difficult
• branding — what they think of after lunch when they think of your class
• first impressions
• smile at door
• syllabus at the start of the year
• sometimes, no matter what you do, your brand sucks. attendance sux. but you’re doing great things for when they come around. math in future years.
• This girl has hated math for years. It isn’t your fault but you must do something about it.

Then I threw my through-line at the list, reshuffled some items, and reworded others so that I never strayed more than a couple steps off the path the whole way through. Audiences don’t enjoy confusion, I’ve concluded. Feel free to write that down.

Expect your audience to have exactly 20% your enthusiasm. Thus, if your enthusiasm level is only at 70% throughout your presentation, the best you can expect of your audience is 14% enthusiasm. 14%! That’s science, people, don’t try to argue me on this. If you aren’t feeling it, please don’t inflict your tepid emotional state on the rest of us.

So we’ve established your love affair with [topic x]. In my case, this last year I fell deeply, romantically, in love with an assessment method that empowers kids instead of sucking them dry. I also became infatuated with the power of little things like show and tell, off-topic questions, and engaging visuals – utterly inconsequential gewgaws on their own – to compound and generate an astonishing buy-in from students who don’t make a habit of buying-in to school.

I wanted to share all of that with my audience of soon-to-be math teachers. Problem was, for about a week, those bullet points didn’t play well together at all.

But then I found the through-line, the narrow path which plunged through all of that brush and more.

I can put it to you in a paragraph:

Math generates “rollover negativity” like few other subjects. Rare is the kid who’ll declare, “I suck at science,” whereas the declaration “I suck at math” echoes around, oftentimes amplified by parents who believe it also. Science classes (just for example) vary enough year-by-year – think: biology, chemistry, physics – that most students come to each new class harboring the possibility that “maybe this one’ll be different.”

Kids think that math is math is math and math teachers have done a lot to perpetuate that deception. Math teachers – by which I mean other math teachers, ha, not you, of course – build and maintain it. Ask a kid to describe a math class – particularly a kid from a district where most of the students get their lunches free – and you’ll receive more or less the same description, a description which we’re rightfully gonna call out as a cliché. And since we here aspire to high-caliber math teaching, we’re going to kick those clichés out of our math classes.

This through-line is ideal for me. Not only does it let me flit in and out of a linear list of clichés – the textbook obsessive, the mathematical monomaniac, the traditional tester, to name three – while remaining dedicated to a single goal (kicking them out of my class) but it neatly establishes a story.

Your through-line must double as a story-line simply because people love and remember good stories. You’ve got to have heroes and villains. The villain here is powerful, positively diabolical, a canny tactician who’s spent years stacking the deck in his favor. When you’ve got some ninth grader whose previous eight math teachers were droning monomaniacs, we’re looking at a hard-scrabbling uphill climb. But watch what we’re about to do.

See what we did there with that story? Kinda got you leaning in towards your monitor a little? You have the first two minutes of your presentation to do the same.

Around this time the title comes into sharper focus. Mine is “Kicking out the Cliché.” Four words which offer an axis of symmetry, a title which is accentuated by the hard “k” sound at its beginning and end. I split two two-syllable words with two one-syllable words to give it a nicer ring than a lot of other candidates. This has all been an attempt at memorability.

See, this has been a depressing summer so far and until recently, I was sure it was gonna end that way. I invested sixty- and seventy-hour weeks this last school year into my identity as Dan Meyer, Teacher. About the second week of pretending to be Dan Meyer, Video Editor, I became, in a very real sense, depressed. I felt flat, mopey, humorless. I wore out the snooze button.

But then somewhere in June I was given an hour to present anything to a group of pre-service math teachers in San Jose, CA. My life has been the second half of a Zoloft commercial since. I’ve invested a lot of time into this presentation not because it demanded it but because every minute I spent hacking away at it, I felt reconnected to the best part of my professional life.

This blog wasn’t around for the construction of my last presentation (everything before January was back-dated) so it seemed appropriate to blog the process of this one.

It’s called “Kicking out the Cliché.” I present it July 19th. It’ll be my best presentation to date. In six (more) daily installments, here’s why.