Bret Devereaux

So when I zoom-lecture, my first slide in every lecture's powerpoint is an outline of the lecture (in bullet points), along with a list of key terms, ideas, people and dates. I encourage students that they should get in the habit of writing that all in their notes first.

That is a stop-gap for my preference in a physical classroom, which is to write that outline on the board before class begins so that it can be there while the PPT is on the screen with images, quotes, etc. Zoom doesn't really allow for that, unfortunately.

The idea here is to prime the students with a conceptual outline (which I talk through at the opening of every lecture, "today we're going to talk about..." style; it's not just up there, I talk it) so they can follow where we are and where we are going.

But the slides I use for the powerpoints themselves are almost all images or diagrams. If there is text, it is a quotation from a primary source which I think is important and worth analyzing.

Perhaps this is me getting old but that was how all of the best lecturers I studied under used visual aids. Those best teachers never put the 'notes' on the powerpoint - the notes were the lecture. You stress key points by repeating them, by drawing attention to them.

(And I am willing to be powerfully silly to draw attention to key points. I will repeat them slowly, I will literally pound the table, pump my first, jump up and down, whatever. I regularly have the class chant key points back to me. I am not afraid to look silly.)

The only time I saw the notes on the PPT was exactly when I used them: beginner teachers who were less experienced and less confident. For me it was a crutch I had to learn to lose. I rather assumed that kind of presentation was something you learned out of, and so I did.

I suppose I find it a touch troubling that there is clearly a subset (relatively small, but noticeable) of students who report struggling with a lecture where the main points are not physically written on the powerpoints in full for them to copy down.

I know I set up classes that way when I was starting out, because it was easy and I didn't know what I was doing. I also know that my teaching mentors pushed me to get away from that approach because it doesn't actually teach students to really absorb the information.

They just copy it down, which isn't the same. I worry students are getting used to an approach where they ignore the spoken words and write down the powerpoints which will equip them poorly for a world where key information is delivered in dialogue that they need to process.