In my sixth grade, I froze on stage during an extempore competition, which scarred me for life. I still feel anxious before any public speaking event thinking - what if I forget? Ironically, for the last ten years as an academic, my core job has been like public speaking - delivering lectures and seminars. So, how did I survive? I share in this article.

Joining Academia

During my college days, I spent almost three to four days preparing for a ten-minute presentation. I had a good command of language and clarity of thought inherited from my father, and I could fake confidence well. So, I would diligently prepare a script and learn everything by heart. The outcome was usually excellent. Back in 2008, we did not use PowerPoint (PPT) extensively. In the decade that followed, it became a norm. My father, who has also been my teacher, and his colleagues felt outdated for not using it.

In 2014, I joined academia, and from ten minutes, the duration of my presentations increased to two hours. It was challenging. I got married in the same year. So, I was building a foundation in both personal and professional life - committing mistakes and learning. While my family was the strongest support in my personal life, PPT came to my rescue on the professional front.

The First Few Years

At the beginning of my career, PPT seemed very useful. Besides providing structure and flow, the slides could be used to show pictures, charts, equations, calculations, and other graphics. I mostly referred to prescribed textbooks and online sources for content. After I went into classrooms day in and day out, I started assimilating knowledge from various sources; including news, reports, videos, interviews, research papers, and observation. One thing that changed drastically with time was my perspective about using slides because what initially helped me, eventually started made me lousy and uninteresting.

The Challenges

The PPT is a visual aid. However, I feel it has been misappropriated as an aid for the speaker to speak rather than an aid for the audience to understand; especially when loaded with complete sentences and full paragraphs with the speaker ending up reading verbatim. As a beginner, there is quite a temptation to copy and paste content. One also ends up using wrong font sizes, mismatched colors, and bizarre backgrounds. But I faced some more significant challenges too.

To begin with, the attention span of my audience was very poor - only 12 and 8 seconds for millennials and Generation Z respectively. Further, it was challenging for them to listen and read simultaneously. This is not surprising. Brain scans show that people swiping their phones cannot hear others talk.

From my end, looking at the slides more than the audience and sometimes showing my back reduced engagement. Unless and until there was a visual to explain what I was saying, these were not very useful. Also, the number of slides or expectations about the next slide made some students anxious. A few restricted themselves and stopped reading anything beyond the slides.

So, what did I change?

When I used PPT in every class, my students started believing that they cannot speak without it. This is not true. In fact, by using PPT extensively, I realized three things.

First, my students felt engaged when I talked to them, looking into their eyes without any distraction. Second, they forgot numbers and facts on the slides I showed but remembered stories, and I had to do the storytelling myself. Third, the best speeches in the world have all been delivered without PPT. A Harvard study  even reported that PPT may dilute individual branding.

I am not against audio-visual aids; I have come across several wonderful teaching aids during the pandemic. But, I feel, there is a difference between using, overusing and abusing. As I reduced  PPTing and started Talking to my students, I felt the joy of learning amplified in the class. It was challenging but rewarding. I still feel anxious, but each class is like my ten-minute presentation and a teeny-tiny victory for me to celebrate at the end of the day!

Disclaimer: (a) I teach management students, so the context here is an MBA class. (b) I am not the World's Best Teacher but I bought a trophy for the same from Amazon last week. (c) This is my personal experience, a bit too personal, you may not agree :)

Now published at: https://poetsandquants.com/2022/03/23/indian-b-school-prof-why-i-stopped-powerpointing-started-talking-to-my-students/