Presentation Zen

Eric Mazur: confessions of a converted lecturer

Eric Mazur is a well known physicist at Harvard University who is also a leader in science education. In the early '90s he developed an instructional approach to teaching called peer instruction. In 1997, he published a book on the subject called Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. Others later supported the seemingly commonsensical idea that student engagement worked, such as Richard Hake in his 1998 report entitled Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. Research which concluded: "the conceptual and problem-solving test results strongly suggest that the classroom use of Interactive-Engaement methods can increase mechanics-course effectiveness well beyond that obtained in traditional practice." To many people, the approach Dr. Mazur advocates may hardly seem new or controversial. After all, many instructors work hard today to make their classes more interactive. However, the one-way, didactic approach to teaching is still common in many schools today.

I thought I was a good teacher
"I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material," says Mazur. "Who was to blame? The students? The material?" In this presentation below from 2009 entitled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer," Mazur explains how he came to the conclusion that "It was my teaching that caused students to fail!" If you have the time I recommend that you watch the entire presentation (over one hour in length). However, there is a rough edit of the same presentation that is still fairly good at getting Mazur's key points across in just 18 minutes. Watch the abridged version here on Youtube.



In summary
Dr. Mazur's approach: (1) Students read the notes and appropriate section of books, etc. before coming to class. "I am not going to lecture on the notes anymore," Mazur says. (2) In the classroom what matters is going deeper. "What's important is depth not coverage." The pre-assigned readings take care of the coverage, but class time offers the chance to go deeper and spend time on those parts that were most difficult for students. This depth, says Mazur, is not obtained through telling but by using a more Socratic method of asking good questions.

The two main features of the peer instruction approach is that (1) there is active engagement in the classroom. "It's impossible to sleep in class because every few minutes your neighbor will start talking to you." And (2) there is continuous information flow back and forth with the student and teacher and also between students. What about solving the physics problems in class? Mazur says that he realized students watching a professor solve problems at the blackboard had little lasting benefit. The benefit of watching a physicist solve problems at the board, says Mazur, is something like training to run a marathon by sitting on the sofa eating chips all day and watching videos of great marathon runners. If you want to be a better runner, you have to run. If you want to be a better problem solver, you have to solve problems. In the end what Mazur found is that when students better understand the material (by going deep, discussing with peers, teaching to peers, etc.), they become better problem solvers. Interestingly, however, Mazur discovered that being a good problem solver (and doing well on tests) did not always indicate understanding.

There are two basic and important points that Dr. Mazur made in this presentation: (1) "Traditional indicators of success are misleading." That is, teacher evaluations and examination results do not reflect whether students really understand the content, even if they do well on the tests. (2) "Education is no longer about information." Mazur says the key is not memorizing recipes and formulas to do well on a test, but rather to develop and demonstrate the ability to use the information to solve problems.

Education and 21st Century Presentation

One of the problems with 20th century approaches to education, according to learning activist and Tokyo International School founder Patrick Newell, is that children are taught what to learn but not how to learn, "and they are slowing educated out of their innate curiosity and creativity." 21:21 The Movie—which is 21 minutes and 21 seconds long— contains interviews with many thought leaders including David Perkins, Kirpal Singh, Philip Zimbardo, David Kelley, and many others. An overview of the elements of 21st century learning can be seen here on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website. Obviously the core subjects are still important, including the "3 Rs," but it's so much more than that. "As teachers and parents," says Newell, "we need to create learning environments which nurture creativity and inspire confidence."

Presentations: nurturing creativity & inspiring confidence
If you are particularly interested in the role presentation plays in the modern classroom—especially presentations researched, designed, and delivered by students—then this section of the video here entitled Learning Through Teaching may be of special interest to you. Last April I was on campus to watch students at the Tokyo International School come together to give presentations of projects on which they'd been working. In this section you can get a glimpse of that event as well as some interviews with students and adults on the role of presentation in this context.

While watching the students present and teach others I was reminded of this old chestnut from Harvard's Erik Mazur, a physics professor who is famous for having his students learn by teaching their peers what they had learned: "You can forget facts, but you can not forget understanding." From what I saw, students learned that presentation is not merely the transfer of information but rather an opportunity to make a contribution. After the event the presenters were even more excited about their subjects and you really could see the confidence in their eyes as a result of a job well done. A job for which they had full ownership. (Watch the full 21:21video here.)


Watch the 21:21 documentary without Japanese subtitles here.

"When learners are engaged in defining their learning processes, and when they have ownership to choose and to use digital tools to express themselves, their excitement becomes tangible, and their skills long-lasting." — Patrick Newell

An organic metaphor for teaching & learning
In the clip below, Sir Ken Robinson speaks of good schools and good teaching as being those that provide the right conditions for students to reach their potential. He calls this more of an organic approach that stresses not an industrial metaphor of mechanization, compliance, and standardization, but rather the creation of the optimal conditions for learning. In this way Robinson says a more modern metaphor would be one of a teacher as gardener or farmer. A farmer depends on plants growing healthy and strong, and yet gardeners do not make plants grow, of course, they provide the conditions for growth to occur. "Great farmers know what the conditions of growth are and bad ones don't," says Robinson. "Great teachers know what the conditions of growth are and bad ones don't."  Part of providing the right conditions in today's world means giving students more ownership of their learning, their explorations, and discoveries. A significant part of that journey is students sharing ideas and materials with students in myriad ways, including the many forms of presentation.



* More material from the movie
Go here to the 21 Foundation Youtube page for many more interviews by the foundation that did not make it into the movie, including interviews with Jill Bolte Taylor, Nalini Nadkarni, Hans Rosling, Nicholas Negroponte, and more. (In the interest of full disclosure I should say that Partick Newell is my personal friend. Yet even if I were not his friend, I would be one of his biggest fans. His energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to education is inspiring.)

Neurochemistry, empathy & the power of story

Dr. Paul Zak is a key contributor in the emerging field of neuroeconomics. He has many interesting talks online including this one delivered at TED in 2011 concerning the issue of morality and the function of the neurochemical oxytocin. But the video I'd like to highlight today concerns the role of neurochemistry and story. Have you ever wondered what is happening to you at the neurochemical level when a story gets your full attention, brings you in, and then causes you to care deeply about its contents? If so, this video below should be of interest.


The video above can be found on the wonderful Future of Storytelling website.

How did you feel when you watched the story of a boy and his father? To be honest, it caught me off guard. I felt such a level of distress that I nearly stopped the video. (Perhaps this is because I have a little baby boy about the same age. There is evidence that a father's brain changes when he begins to raise his children. I believe it.) Dr. Zak's research suggests that during a story like the one used in the video, most viewers produce powerful empathic responses, responses which are associated with the neurochemicals cortisol and oxytocin. A few moments in to the video, when I heard of the boy's fate, I felt as if I were becoming physically ill. Dr. Zak says this is in part a reaction to the distress hormone cortisol. This distress hormone is associated with attention—the more distress one feels the greater the focus in this case. As I kept watching, like most people who watched this, I felt great concern (or feelings of sadness, sympathy, compassion, etc.). These feelings are related to oxytocin, a hormone associated with care, connection, and empathy. The more oxytocin released, the more empathetic people felt toward Ben and his father.

Dr. Zak's research goes on to suggest that we can use these brain responses to elicit concrete actions, such as getting people to make more generous donations. For example, in one of his studies, Dr. Zak determined that the amount of oxytocin released could predict how much money people shared in an experimental setting. One suggestion is that the type of narrative used in the story of the boy and his father—a form of Freytag's story pyramid—changed the neurochemistry of brain (which changed behavior).

I do not mean to make too much of this, but the early research in this field seems to support what we already know through experience, which is that a story is ineffectual if it does not make people care. A story must get our attention and make us care. Period. That is not all there is to it, of course, but these two elements are crucial and yet not easy to achieve.

A powerful narrative in transformation (redux)

Canadian poet and writer Shane Koyczan's To This Day was featured below a few weeks ago because it's an excellent personal narrative amplified by its visual presentation. That version of the poem was sent by Koyczan to his fans earlier this year with the message: "My experiences with violence in schools still echo throughout my life but standing to face the problem has helped me in immeasurable ways. Schools and families are in desperate need of proper tools to confront this problem. This piece is a starting point." This video went viral and  has touched the lives of many in a short time.

TED 2013
Koyczan was asked to speak at the 2013 version of TED in Long Beach, California. That live presentation took place during the session called "Secret Voices" on Thursday, February 28. Fortunately for those who could not be in the room live, TED put it up on the their site rather quickly. I like this version as much or perhaps even more than the animated version. The words may be the same, but if it is authentic, the delivery will feel natural, like the words are being spoken for the first time. And if Koyczan is anything it is authentic. Authenticity is risky—and what could be riskier and more vulnerable that speaking of your pain in front of a group of strangers. Remarkable and inspiring. This TED version below includes Koyczan standing before the audience live, front and center, and is subtly augmented by some animation displayed at times as well as live musical accompaniment. I love the way Koyczan eased his way into the poem and brings you inside his story in such a way that one forgets this is a man on stage reciting his poem. If it is a good story told well we become unaware of the medium. What matters is the feeling. What lingers long after the performance is the meaning. Even if you have seen Koyczan's To This Day before, it is worth seeing again...and sharing it with others.

Quotes
"They asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be."
“I've been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself.”
“If you can't see anything beautiful about yourself, get a better mirror.”

 • Shane Koyczan's website

The world needs you to stop being boring

Inspiration and a great story can come from anywhere. Today it comes from a 9-year-old child named Robbie Nova, a dynamic young man who is wise beyond his years. Robbie, also known as Kid President, was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta ("Brittle Bone syndrome"), but he's obviously not going to let it get in the way of his dreams. "This is life people! You got air coming from your nose! You got a heart beat! That means it's time to do something!" The video below has been seen by million in a very short time and is even featured on the TED website. Kid President has an important message for all of us, whether we're 9-years old or 89, and that is: Stop being boring. "The world needs you to stop being boring," he says. "Everyone can be boring. Boring is easy!" Watch the video below or here on TED.com. 



Encourage others
I love Kid President's core message: Encourage others. But many people do not themselves feel encouraged. What should you do, then, when you feel discouraged? This question was addressed in the book Essential Zen: A student asked the master during a meditation retreat, "I am very discouraged. What should I do?" To which the master replied: "Encourage others." When we encourage others we often feel encouraged ourselves. There is more to education than encouragement, but it's something that is undervalued by antiquated systems based on compliance and threats of punishment rather than on the joy of exploration and discovery. Anatole France said "nine tenths of education is encouragement."

What will you create that's remarkable?
"What will you create that will make the world awesome?" Robbie Nova asks. "Nothing if you keep sitting there!" So get up and take the road less traveled — that's the road that leads to awesome! As Robbie says: It's time to do something, people!

• Kid President on Wikipedia.
• Kid President's story (video).

To This Day: A powerful narrative in transformation

In Will Eisner’s wonderful book Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Graphic Narrative is defined as “…a generic description of any narrative that employs image to transmit and idea. Film and comics both engage in graphic narrative.” Other forms of digital storytelling meet this definition, too, such as this example below which is a beautifully written and powerfully delivered poem by Canadian poet and writer Shane Koyczan. Koyczan teamed up with a host of volunteer animators to produce a seven-minute visual narrative called To This Day. It's a fantastic project. It's a great piece as an audio track, but with the help of animators it became something even more powerful. It has been up for a short time but the evocative, provocative video has received millions of views already.  Watch it on YouYube.



Can the audience relate?
This graphic narrative is something virtually everyone can relate to at some level. Even if one were fortunate enough to have never been bullied in any way at school, surely no one has escape childhood without witnessing the cruel hand of bullying in the classroom and elsewhere or verbal abuse at home. This video resonates with so many because virtually everyone can share what the storyteller had the courage to share here. Koyczan's message is an important one to hear and to share.

“An Audience is always interested in experiences of someone with whom they can relate. There is something very private that occurs within the reader [or listener/viewer] while he ‘shares’ the actor’s experience. The operative word is ‘share,’ because the inner feelings of the protagonist are understandable to the reader who would have similar emotions under the same circumstances.”

                    — Will Eisner in Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative

• To This Day on Vimeo

On the power of speech & telling your own story

Last week I was in the beautiful city of Wellington, New Zealand for Webstock 2013. While working out of my room in the Museum Hotel late one night I received an email from Nick White. Nick had been one of the participants in the first series of seminars I ran in Wellington in 2008. I remembered Nick for his enthusiasm for public speaking as well as his love of mountain running, interests that we share. I had not heard from him for five years, so just in case I did not recall his name, Nick sent me a scan of the note I had written in his PZ book so many years ealier (above). Since I last saw Nick he went through quite an ordeal to say the least. In his email to me he shared the news of his  battle with cancer, and sent me a link to his Ignite talk from 2011. I watched his talk on YouTube immediately and was blown away by his presentation. There are several inspiring elements to Nick's talk, including the delivery itself. My favorite line is from his surgeon, Swee Tan: "Life's a bugger, but we're going for cure." Nick's story of battling cancer, losing his speech, and then working hard to get it back...and then runnning The Goat as planned is truly an inspiring tale of hope, belief, and rugged determination.

Watch Nick's talk in HD on Youtube below. (What is Ignite?)



Preparing analog
The Ignite formula for presentations is 20 slides with each slide advancing automatically every 15 seconds. "I planned the presso very, very carefully, changing and redrafting it many times, thinking about the mood of the story," Nick said. "The constraints of the format actually helped by forcing me to make tough decisions on what was crucial and non-crucial to the story." Nick told me he worked hard to simplify his talk and used techniques from presentation zen as well as using a lot of helpful advice from Olivia Mitchell, a fantastic presentation coach based in Wellington.


Above: A rough sketch Nick drew showing the flow of his talk before he ever made a slide.


Above: One of the rough drafts Nick sketched of how his visuals would actually appear once he had his story down. A good tip is to make rough sketches of the kind of visuals you want *before* you go searching for images.

A story has exposition, conflict, and resolution. Basic yet important stuff. A story, however, is often as much about a journey of change in one's inner world as it is in the physical world. In this case Nick shows us both. Story is transformation, and this story is a remarkable one. Please share Nick White's presentation if you can. It just may help someone who could use a little inspiration right now.

• Contact Nick White on Twitter: @outwardnick
• Nick's website Outward Looking

Lessons in engagement from Flight of the Conchords

What makes some of the best speeches or presentations so memorable is not that they are perfect or slick, or overly polished, but that they are human. And to be human is to be imperfect. This is why so many of us are attracted to live musical performances. Studio recordings are fine, but there is a visceral human element that one gets from a live performnce. I loved what Dave Grohl said about this in his 2012 Grammy speech: 

"...the human element of music is what's important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that's the most important thing for people to do... It's not about being perfect, it's not about sounding absolutely correct, it's not about what goes on in a computer. It's about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head]."

Of course you prepare well and practice. You have a plan. But when it's live things will change as you adapt to the dynamics of the moment and the unique audience before you. As Charlie Parker once said:

        “Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget
             all that bullshit and just play.” — Charlie Parker

Going analog on stage and the art of storytelling
 All this week I am in Wellington, New Zealnd so I am reminded of a couple of  musicians from Wellington, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, otherwise known as the Grammy-winning duo Flight of the Conchords. Flight of the Conchords bill themselves as "Formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a-capella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo." In the clips below what stands out is their naturalness, their self-deprecating nature, their body language, and their ability to simply and without complication engage with their audience as they paint pictures with their lyrics and subtle humor and use their guitars and wit to make visceral connections.

A story about a simple conversation
People are attracted to story. Watch Jemaine and Bret below keep an audience engaged and following their words even when it's a story "about nothing" at all really.

Business Time
Business Time was made into a slicker music video, but this simple analog version below is better. The facial expressions are priceless and go along way toward amplifying the message. It's also a good example of why sometimes visuals are not needed — going completely naked sans slides forces you to use just your words, your nonverbal language, and in this case the music. In a sense, then, *they* are the visuals.

Talkin' about the issues
OK, this one below is a bit weird and perhaps not "politically correct" for some, but if you liked the first two clips you may find this song enjoyable as well. The absurdity of the lyrics are an evocative juxtaposition to the light, upbeat pop riff underlying their words. I just love the simplicity and subtlety of their off-beat and slightly awkward humor and I envy their ability to connect with a live audience.

To live is to have a story to tell

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?” This quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky's White Nights (1848) was sent in by a reader today. Life by its very nature is a struggle, a journey on a road with ups and downs and more conflict than we like to admit. But this is life, this is drama. "Conflict, struggle, overcoming obstacles, both inside and outside, are the primary ingredients in all drama," says Syd Fields in Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. "All drama is conflict. Without conflict, you have no action; without action, you have no character; without character, you have no story; and without story, you have no screenplay." To live is to have a story to tell. Whether you decide to share your story (stories) with others is another matter.

The directness and clarity of the Dostoevsky line reminded me of some of the advice that you might hear from screenwriting guru Robert McKee. The clip below features actor Brian Cox playing the Robert McKee character giving feedback to a writer's question (played by Nicolas Cage) in the Oscar-winning movie Adaptation. It's worth seeing (or seeing again if you are familiar with it).

A takeaway line: "If you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you'll bore your audience to tears." We can apply the spirit of this to the world of multimedia presentations as well. You do not have to create material to rival Citizen Kane, but your message can be communicated much better if you identify the conflict and the journey to resolve the conflict while making it clear why your audience should care.

A beautiful story told without a single word

Wonderful lessons in visual storytelling can come from anywhere. Good films, even animated shorts, are rich in storytelling lessons. Below is an animated short by Disney called Paperman which visually merges the simplicity and expressive feel of traditional 2-D sketches with the power of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Visually I find this treatment refreshing somehow. CG animation today is amazing, of course, and with two small children at home I think I've seen every Pixar or Dreamworks film a million times by now. This new film with its less photorealistic imagery is simple and easy on the eyes, and yet it has a depth and richness that never gets in the way or reminds you that you are watching animated drawings. Technical innovations aside, this six-minute film is also a good example of basic storytelling techniques such as creating a specific small world with a clear setting and a sympathetic character that takes us on a small journey of rising intensity, and so on. The short is also a reminder of the power of the visual to tell a story as the film has no dialog (though the audio effects and musical score are excellent). Watch it here or below. (Be sure to choose the HD setting on Youtube.)



Here you can find three short video clips with the film's director John Kahrs discussing the inspiration of the story and the innovative technology behind the making of the Academy Award nominated film.

H/T Thibaud Godet