Slide:ology

In preparation for writing my book for Corwin Press on Partnership Learning (I plan to be done by December!), I have read many books on the topic of creating presentations.   Without a doubt, the book that I have learned the most from is Slide:ology, created by Nancy Duarte

Duarte is the person who helped Al Gore create his Inconvenient Truth presentation.   That presentation, of course, was so powerful that Gore won an academy award, the Nobel Prize, and, perhaps most impressively, dramatically raised global awareness about the dangers of climate change.   It would not be unreasonable to say that no one has done more to influence how we think about global warming, and a large part of the reason for that is simply the way in which Gore’s presentation was put together and delivered.

Indeed, so useful and comprehensive is Duarte’s book, that I’d have to say that on the topic of developing presentations, there is this book, and there is everything else.   Reading Slide:ology was a revelation of sorts; I’ve come to see the presentations I have created as primitive, clumsy products compared to what they might be.   I feel as if someone finally explained grammar to me after I’d been writing for years making multiple grammatical errors.

So what does her book teach us? I’m not able to summarize all she says.   However, here are some of her suggestions, or at least ideas that caught my attention today as I went back through Slide:ology:

·       Brainstorm prior to presenting using post-it notes.   Write on the post-its using a Sharpie.   If the idea is too complex to write with a thick Sharpie pen, then you need to make it simpler

·       Use stick men and other drawings to develop the story of your presentation.   Don’t think of your presentation as a series of individual slides but as a coherent unit

·       Come to an understanding of your audience by asking, (1) What are they like? (2) Why are they here? (3) What keeps them up at night? (4) How can you solve their problem? (5) What do you want them to do? (6) How might they resist, (7) How can you best reach them?

·       “Data slides are not really about the data, they are about the meaning of the data,” so follow the five data slide rules: tell the truth, get to the point, pick the right tool for the job, keep it simple. Duarte goes into great detail explaining just how to do these things

·       Expect to use a lot of time to plan a presentation, maybe as much as 60 hours for a 1 hour, 30 slide presentation

·       Duarte explains that effective slide design hinges on three things: arrangement, visual elements, and movement, and then she tells us in great detail what to do about that

·       White space, which isn’t necessarily white but which is the part of the slide which is unused, “is as much an element of the slide as bullets, headings, and diagrams”

·       “it’s OK to have clear space; clutter is a failure of design.” “Remove everything on your slide that doesn’t bring emphasis to your point”

·       “The four visual elements of a slide are background, color, text, and image”

·       Background: Throw our your PowerPoint templates and start thinking of your background as a blank canvas that you design intentionally

·       Use the same colors through out your presentation and use colors that integrate harmoniously.   Use the color wheel on PowerPoint or Keynote to help you find harmonious colors

·       Consider using pure white or pure black backgrounds since they are best for showing contrast

·       When using text, use the 3 second rule, that is people need to understand the slide in 3 seconds

·       Don’t combine more than 2 fonts during a presentation

·       Part of effective slide design is considering type setting issues like kerning, ligatures, and letter spacing (you’ll have to look these up to get her suggestions)

·       Think about the bullets in your slides (if you use them at all, and there is much to be said for not using them) as headlines

·       Use sides that use a family of images, that is images with similar colors, lighting, themes, rather than a wide range of images that don’t necessarily go together.   Using the first image you find each time can creates a unharmonious presentation

·       Be careful about creating visual vertigo by using too much animation

·       When reducing your old slides, highlight the key word in each bullet, and then practice reading the slide by focusing on that word, then create a slide with only those words

·       Try not to use font smaller than 30 point

·       Remember that your audience can’t read and listen to you at the same time, so consider creating slides that have fewer words if you want them to listen to you

These are just some of the comments (ironically summarized in bullet point, it occurs to me), but they do not do the complexity and in fact beauty of the book justice. She goes into great detail about what kinds of diagrams we might consider using, or how to select the right color family, or how to do type setting for maximum impact. Truly, the book is full of useful ideas, thoroughly developed. And even Gar Reynolds, the author of another comparable book, Presentation Zen calls it the best book on presenting ever created.   So I suggest, if you’re interested in taking your slides several levels forward, that you consider looking into Slide:ology.  You can  also view an interesting little video by Nancy Duarte on the Amazon.com website for her book.

Before closing I want to add that I can imagine some of you might sensibly be saying, “Well why should I be concerned with this, I’m a coach, why would I need to worry about presenting.” I’m convinced that workshops and presentations are still important parts of professional learning in schools.   Workshops introduce new ideas into the school or district, with coaching providing the support to translate those ideas into action.    For that reason, our presentations should be as well done (and I would include partnership learning structures) as possible.   Creating a well-prepared presentation is just as important as crafting a well-prepared written document; anything less is at least careless and may be irresponsible.   Of course, a well-crafted presentation, where the slides powerfully support the talking and learning structures, can be an exciting, authentic, and truly useful way of sharing information. I think Slide:ology can help us do that.   

Next week I'll write about Sway a book about "the irresistible pull of irrational behavior."  I think it is must reading for coaches.

What Micheal Fullan can teach instructional coaches

 No author has had a bigger impact on my thinking about change and leadership than Michael Fullan . In his new book, The Six Secrets of Change he provides a great deal of food for thought for coaches and other leaders of change in education.

Below, I'll provide a few quotations from Michael's book on each of the six secrets, and then offer a few of my thoughts about their implications for coaches.

Secret One: Love Your Employees

Michael references many authors in the book, but in this section he includes several insights he gathered from a very interesting book, which I'll comment on in the future, Firms of Endearment.  Here are a few quotations:

"One of the ways you love your employees is by creating the conditions for them to suceed" (p. 25)

"Carl Cohn (2007) says 'empowering those at the bottom beats punishing them from top" (p.25)

"… lead with credibility and caring, invest in frontline leadership, hire and retain for relational competence, use conflicts to build relationships, bridge the work-family divide, create boundary spanners, measure performance broadly, keep jobs flexible at the boundaries, make unions your partners, and build relationships with suppliers"   ( pg. 32)

My comments

Coaching it seems to me, has a major role in "loving your employees."  First, providing coaching that significantly supports professional learning clearly is one way that administrators can love their employees.  Second, coaches, by engaging in respectful, compassionate conversation one person at a time, can lead culture change that creates more humane, respectful conversations.  Third, punishing employees, as opposed to loving them, is likely the kiss of death for a coaching program.

Secret Two: Connect Peers With Purpose

"Purposeful peer interaction, or perhaps I should say positive purposeful peer interaction, works effectively under three conditions: (1) when the larger values of the organization and those of the individuals and groups mesh; (2) when information and knowledge about effective practices are widely and openly shared; and (3) when monitoring mechanisms are in place to detect and address ineffective actions while also identifying and consolidating effective practices."   ( pg. 45)

 "… identifying with an entity larger than oneself expands the self, with powerful consequences."  ( pg. 49)

"When teachers within a school collaborate, they begin to think not just about “my classroom” but also about “our school.”   ( pg. 49)

My comments

Reading this chapter, and listening to Michael at the recent SIM Conference, have got me thinking about ways in which coaches can expand their role to include supporting, facilitating, and operationalizing (that is taking ideas and helping them be translated into action) peer interaction in formal structures such as Professional Learning Communities and informal structures such as social settings.  Coaches, I think, can do a lot to accelerate and amplify meaningful peer interaction.

But I also think that Web 2.0 can provide a mechanism for educators to share ideas, gain and provide support, and interact in other meaningful ways.  It may be that the web will be an incredibly powerful tool for fostering purposeful, peer interaction. 

Secret Three: Capacity Building Prevails

"Another way to love your employees is to select them well and then invest in their continuous development" (p. 57)

"One of the ways not to develop capacity is though criticism, punitive consequences, or what I more comprehensively call judgementalism. Judgmentalism is not just seeing something as unacceptable or ineffective. It is that, but it is particularly harmful when it is accompanied by pejorative stigma, if you will excuse the redundancy. The advice here, especially for a new leader, is don’t roll your eyes on day one when you see practice that is less than effective by your standards. Instead, invest in capacity building while suspending short-term judgment"     ( p. 58)

My comments:  

Well first, of course, instructional coaching is a great way to build capacity in schools. Also, the approach Michael refers to as non-judgmentalism, parallel's my own belief in the importance of what I call the partnership approach.  Finally, one of the things that I am occasionally troubled by is the failure of school leaders to see the short-sitedness of focussing on quick fixes rather than long-term capacity building like coaching.

Secret Four: Learning is the Work

In this chapter Michael includes many ideas from Liker and Meyer's book  Toyota Talent, another book I'll be discussing on this blog in the near future.

"the most important job of any manager is to teach workers to become more effective; “the biggest success of any manager is the success of the people they have taught (L & M, p. 313)”    (p. 87)

…”real learning comes from repeated practice with additional coaching from the trainer (L & M, p. 246)” (p. 87)

“The objective is not to identify whom to blame for a problem, it is to find out where the system failed (L &M, p. 289)” (p.88)     

“ 'If you want great people to do their best work, the logic goes, then you’ve got to create the right working conditions the moment they walk through the door' [from Taylor and LaBarre, p.261).   And then you have to keep creating cultures of learning every day that they are on the job .      pg. 89

My comments

My first reaction, is right on!, that is exactly the way we see it, but I as I think further about this, I want to add that we need to consider how Michael's comments apply to coaches themselves, that is, how can coaches ensure that they are doing excellent work, that they are continually improving.  Since coaches are central to any organizational learning effort, I think it is essential that they are continuously learning and focussing on best practices.  To put it another way, if the coaches aren't learning, ain't nobody learning.

Secret Five: Transparency Rules

"Transparency concerns assessing, communicating, and acting on data pertaining to the what, how, and outcomes of change efforts" (p. 93)

"Transparency is not causing teachers to become what my colleagues Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves (2006) characterized as “data-driving to distraction.” It is insufficient to have strictly a results orientation; you also have to learn the processes and practices to achieve those desired results" (p. 93)

"Transparency involves being open about results and practices and is essentially an exercise in pursuing and nailing down problems that recur and identifying evidence-informed responses to them" (p.99)

"To move beyond mere transparency, we have to work on the conditions under which transparency can be used simultaneously for both improvement and accountability. We know that people will cover up and not report problems if the culture punishes them So one thing we need to work on is developing cultures in which it is normal to experience problems and solve them as they occur – exactly what the organizations we have been discussing do. In other words, effective cultures embrace transparency and the use of data as a core part of their work" (p.101)   

"in all cases of successful change transparent data are used as tools for improvement" (p.102)   

My comments  

Authors such as Joellen Killion and  Nancy Love have much to teach us about how coaches can support the meaningful analysis of data as well as support instructional improvements that are derived from that data.  Also, again, coaches should also use data to honestly look at and improve their effectiveness.  By analyzing and acting on data such as implementation rates, number of teachers worked with, quality of implementation, student achievement improvements, and uses of time can all help coaches improve their practices.  

Secret Six: Systems Learn      

Michael includes a quotation from Hargreaves and Fink:  "Discontinuity that is reversing a bad situation needs to be pushed with steadfastness over a long period of time, until it becomes the new continuity. While planned discontinuity can yield rapid results, its leadership needs time to consolidate the new culture, to embed it in the hearts and minds of everyone.   Repeatedly, planned discontinuity was effective in shaking up the schools in our study but not at making changes stick… Leaders of planned discontinuity in schools were transferred to struggling schools elsewhere long before their existing work had been completed. The result was a constant cycle of change throughout schools in the system but little lasting improvement in any one of them [2006, p. 69]" (p. 108)                                                                                                                                 

"The first task of Secret Six is to enact the first five secrets. By so doing, organizational members will feel valued and be valued (Secret One), be engaged in purposeful peer interaction that generates knowledge and commitment (Secret Two), build their individual and collective capacity (Secret Three), learn every day on the job (Secret Four) and experience the value of transparency in practice linked to marking progress (Secret Five). The net effect is a critical mass of organizational colleagues who are indeed learners. Because their worlds have in fact become enlarged through wider engagement inside and outside the organization, they have a broader system perspective and are more likely to act with the larger context in mind"  (p.111)

"Leaders who operate from a position of certitude are bound to miss something, are likely to be wrong more than their share of times, and almost certainly will not learn from their experiences"   (p. 117)

My comments:

Of course, coaching stands at the heart of secret six in that coaches empower others to be learners, and by facilitating individual positive learning experiences.  By ensuring that individuals are successful, and by letting others know about that success, and by facilitating networking and sharing of ideas, coaches can be important creators of learning cultures.

Andy Hargreaves' idea about discontinuous change also has implications for coaches.  If schools are in a merry-go-round of change, what I call, the Atttempt, Attack, Abandon cycle, they make it difficult for coaches to be effective simply because teachers in such situations are often suspicious of any new initiatives.

All in all, taking the time to think this through a little, I am impressed by how valuable Six Secrets of Change could be for a coach.  THe more coaches know about change, the more successful they can be, and the more they will indeed be able to lead positive improvements in their schools.

Next week I will write about Slide:ology, a new book about preparing presentations by Susan Duarte, president of the consulting firm that helped Al Gore create his Inconvenient Truth presentation.  If you liked Presentation Zen, you'll find this book very interesting.    

Update on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 12:33AM by Jim Knight

You can see an edited version of Michael Fullan's presentation on the Six Secrets at the CRL Learns website

Twitter time for Instructional Coaches

 So how would coaches use Twitter?  To start, coaches could sign up for Twitter and then do a search for instructional coaches, or just search for Jim Knight since I'm following a growing number of coaches each day.  Then click on those coaches to follow them.  Try to follow as many coaches as possible.  Then, wait for them to follow you, and sign up when they want to follow you. Be on the look out for Twitter spam as marketers will try to get you to follow them as well.  Finally, to keep the community going, make it a point to make a post once or twice a day so that others have something to read.  If you find a cool article, do something creative at school, get a new idea, write a little tweet to let us all know what you are doing. Or, if you're facing a challenge, put out a little tweet asking for advice or suggestions. The more people contribute, the more valuable our twittering coaches community might be.  Also, consider using tinyurl as a simple way to share websites.  Finally, encourage your friends to get on, link up, and share.  How cool it is going to be when we have 1000 coaches sharing ideas and asking for suggestions all through our community.  And you can be one of the pioneers. I should mention that technology coach Cathy Baker from DuPage County, Illinois gets all credit for starting me thinking about twitter, and the use of tinyurl. And, you can follow her tweets by linking from my page, of course.

Update on Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 02:46PM by Jim Knight

Aaron Sumner pointed out this nice article about Twitter that offers a nice overview of what it is what its potential is. And, he pointed me to it on Twitter :)

Daniel Pink's Whole New Mind

Recently I received an email from a coach who asked me an interesting question. “Since computers and technology are becoming more and more powerful, don’t you think coaches will eventually be obsolete?”  

As it turns out, I just happened to be reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, and it seems to me the book does a good job of explaining why we’ll likely need coaches for a long, long time.   In his book, Pink makes the case that we are undergoing a seismic shift to a world in which right brain thinking will be dominant.   I had always been a little skeptical about right brain thinking, but Pink’s book, and the ideas on his blog are truly food for thought.

Pink says the following.  This new way of thinking will be “animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life – one that prizes aptitudes that I call “high concepts” and “high touch.” High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning” (p. 3)

Pink identifies six “senses”, on which, he says,   “professional success and personal satisfaction increasingly will depend. Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning.   Here is what he says about each of these:

1. Not just function but also DESIGN. It’s no longer sufficient to create a product, a service, an experience, or a lifestyle that’s merely functional. Today it’s economically crucial and personally rewarding to create something that is also beautiful, whimsical, or emotionally engaging.

2. Not just argument but also STORY.   When our lives are brimming with information and data, it’s not enough to marshal an effective argument. Someone somewhere will inevitably track down a counterpoint to rebut your point. The essence of persuasion, communication and self-understanding has become the ability also to fashion a compelling narrative.

3. Not just focus but also SYMPHONY. Much of the Industrial and Information Ages required focus and specialization. But as white–collar work gets routed to Asia and reduced to software, there’s a new premium on the opposite aptitude: putting the pieces together, or what I call Symphony. What’s in greatest demand today isn’t analysis but synthesis – seeing the big picture, crossing boundaries, and being able to combine disparate pieces into an arresting new whole.

4. Not just logic but also EMPATHY.   The capacity for logical thought is one of the things that makes us human. But in a world of ubiquitous information and advanced analytic tools, logic alone won’t do. What will distinguish those who thrive will be their ability to understand what makes their fellow woman or man tick, to forge relationships, and to care for others.

5. Not just seriousness but also PLAY.   Ample evidence points to the enormous health and professional benefits of laughter, lightheartedness, games and humor. There is a time to be serious, of course. But too much sobriety can be bad for your career and worse for your general well-being. In the Conceptual Age, in work and in life, we all need to play.

6. Not just accumulation but also MEANING. We live in a world of breathtaking material plenty. That has freed hundreds of millions of people from day to day struggles and liberated us to pursue more significant desires: purpose, transcendence, and spiritual fulfillment.   (pps. 65, 66, & 67)

So what does this have to do with friends question about coaches becoming obsolete?   Well, I believe that many of that attributes Pink identifies, attributes that he says are things that computers cannot do, are precisely the attributes of effective coaches. That is, coaches need to be empathetic, craft stories, integrate ideas, simplify to create meaning, and heck, let’s play a little too.    I just don’t see the web being able to handle these human attributes, so until computers start to empathize and use the computer equivalent of their right brain, I think coaches will be needed.

Next week, I'll write about Michael Fullan's Six Secrets of Change

Twittering Coaches

At today's Instructional Coaching Institute, I proposed we create a country wide community of twittering coaches, that is coaches who update each other on their actions and communicate through twitter. So if you're reading this, and you're interested, just sign up to Twitter.com, look for me, Jim Knight, and then start following the people I'm following.  Right now the group is small, but all things start that way. Wouldn't it be interesting to see 100 or more coaches sharing their daily experiences all learning from each other, all through twitter?