Those who know me and who've read my blog previously, will know that I am not a fan of PowerPoint. It's time-consuming and I don't see it as worth it. Instead I use OneNote and, what Adam Boxer calls a "blank canvas" (Boxer, 2021a). Something I've heard a lot is that doing things this way requires you to have better subject knowledge than teaching via a PowerPoint and I disagree. There is an idea that using a blank canvas and live modelling is somehow "winging it" - because I don't walk into the room with a slide deck, that I'm somehow making it up as I go along. This is very much not the case. Everything is planned, and it is planned using the same principles that should always underpin our planning, no matter how we intend to deliver it.
- Start with what you want the students to know* by the end. What knowledge do you want them to have? Then work backwards. How will you know if they have this knowledge? How will you get your point across to them? Adam Boxer (2021) says you should be "figuring out what you want students to know by the time you are finished with them, and building your explanations and work around that". Peps Mccrea (2021) says something similar, calling on teachers to "[start] at the end. This is called 'backwards design' and entails asking yourself: → What do I want my pupils to have learnt by the end of this session?" When you plan, keep in mind what exactly it is that you want the students to be able to know by the end. Think of it like planning a journey. When you plan a route, you start with your destination in mind - maybe you look at which buses go there or which tube line it's on - and then you work backwards to your house. You don't just get on a bus by your house and just hope it takes you where you want to go.
*if you're into the whole skills over knowledge thing, feel free to think of this as "know how to do". - How will you know the students have got there? For me, the answer is "they can answer these questions". And then I start thinking about how exactly am I going to get them to be able to answer those questions.
- How are you going to get them there? What things do you need to include in your explanation(s)? What questions are you going to ask them to make sure they understand? How much practice are you going to give them?
An example:
Imagine I'm teaching the structure and properties of solids, liquids, and gases to year 7.
These are the things that students need to know by the end (booklet available here). These are my goals, my end points, my sign that students have learned what I need them to learn.
The next thing to do is to think about the best way to explain this - what are you going to say, what are you going to draw. If I were to use a slide deck in my lesson, this would be done on the slides. I'd probably go onto Google and find some nice images, I'd write some bullet points to remind me what to say, I'd waste my life putting in the animations so it all comes up at exactly the right time so I'm not splitting student attention, or overloading their working memory.
Instead, I do this on paper. I sketch out the diagrams I want to use, the non-examples I want to use. I put in points where students will be asked questions. We have the booklets I linked to above, so I can just write "q1-5", or if I want them to answer something that's not in the booklet, I'll write out the question. It's not shown in the image, but after the explanation, I'll use a Quick and Dirty Check and Consolidate (Boxer, 2021a; Boxer, 2021b) where I'll erase part of the diagram and get students to recreate it or label it or identify it or similar on their mini whiteboards. I'll usually mark this on my plan with the letters MWB or QDC&C [I don't know why the first "and" gets ignored]. As an aside, the QDC&C is really useful - it helpfully bridges the gap between your explanation and their own work, in the same way a worked example would for e.g. a calculation question.
If it's a lesson on something my subject knowledge isn't where I'd like it to be, then I will have a much more detailed "script" than, in this example, something that I know like the back of my hand. But the principles are the same.
This whole thing will have been built up bit by bit by bit, the whole time essentially being narrated. In the same way that when you use a PowerPoint, you talk about the stuff on the screen.
Now, there are things I would definitely change next time - I've started using red to cross out my non-examples so it's really clear that they're wrong, I would put the word "steam" underneath the diagram like I did with ice and water, I would probably add in another concrete example before going onto the abstract. I'd probably draw a kettle or a saucepan and have the same "zooming" thing I have for the ice and water. I don't know why I changed the order of the descriptors. [The yellow bit isn't part of the diagram - I have no idea what it is, ignore it] But the idea is there.
Looking at this, there's not much that is different to what you'd expect to see on a slide used to teach the same thing, other than the ice/water/steam example would probably be on a different slide. The difference is, this was built up in real time, in front of the students. I could direct their attention to exactly the thing I wanted them to be attending to. We are capable of attending to a whole range of things, and to switch our attention almost at will. It is entirely possible for a student to attend to a specific part of a whole diagram, but it's a lot easier if that's the only [new] bit of the diagram.
I will also say, and this is purely anecdotal, that I tend to find behaviour marginally easier to manage when I teach like this, than when I teach using a PowerPoint. I think it's because the students realise they have to pay attention to what I'm saying and they can't just skim-read the slide and ignore me. Like I said though, this is purely anecdotal. Maybe I'm just lucky.
TL;DR: The same "principles" of planning that underpin a lesson that will be delivered via slides underpin a lesson that will be delivered starting with a blank canvas. You don't need special skills or deeper subject knowledge, or anything more or different than you need to teach from slides. Other than like, a visualiser or a graphics tablet or a touch-screen laptop.
Boxer, A., 2021a. Explaining Science.
Boxer, A., 2021b. Teaching Secondary Science: A Complete Guide. Woodridge: John Catt Educational.
Mccrea, P., 2021. A short thread on one of the most critical concepts in planning for learning. [Tweet] @PepsMccrea, Available at: <https://twitter.com/PepsMccrea/status/1444723945551314950?s=20> [Accessed 31 October 2021].