3 Simple Slide Tips That Deepen Learning—and Save Time

We all want to get our students to think deeply about important ideas, but that goal requires preparation, and preparation requires time. No matter what or where we teach, it can feel like we never have enough. But we can reclaim some of our precious time by reusing existing resources in new ways that promote deep thinking and learning. One easy, overlooked way to accomplish this goal is with our presentation slides, and it’s a method that requires less preparation, not more.

Blank Slides

If you use slides as you teach—whether Google Slides or some other program—a simple “blank slide” technique can increase the chances that students will deeply process key points during your lesson. According to dual coding research, students can’t simultaneously process written text on a slide and comprehend what you are saying at the same time. You can avoid this issue and use your existing slides to quickly add more deep thinking time for students by adding “knowledge dump” slides to an existing slide set:

• In a slide set you already made, look for a few slides with important points you want students to deeply process. After each of these super-important slides, add a blank slide (or a slide with a visual cue that you train students to recognize).
• When you get to one of these super-important slides, instruct students to put down their pens (or close their laptops) and think about the slide and listen to your explanation or example without taking notes. Their job is to look, listen, and think deeply about the idea. No note-taking allowed while looking at the super-important slide!
• When you’re done explaining the super-important slide, click ahead to the blank slide you added. This blank slide is a signal to students that it’s time for them to do a knowledge dump—to go back to their notes and write everything they can retrieve about the important point you just shared. 
• After giving students some time for the knowledge dump, move on to the next slide in your existing set and keep on teaching.

Selectively inserting these knowledge dump opportunities for students doesn’t add to your preparation time, and you increase opportunities for students to think deeply about some of the most important ideas in your class.

Old Slides

You can use your existing slides in a different way to assess what information students encoded into long-term memory during a previous lesson and strengthen their ability to retrieve the information via retrieval practice. Adding an old slide into your current set of slides can help strengthen students’ ability to retrieve important information from their long-term memory. 

To do that, take a slide from your previous lesson with a photo or diagram relevant to one of the important concepts from that lesson and insert it into your slide deck for your current day’s lesson.

When you get to that old slide in your deck, ask students to write about the connections between the current day’s lesson and this slide from the previous lesson, which they have seen before.

If students are following connections between your lessons and the big, overarching ideas in the unit, they should be able to write about links between the ideas represented by the old slide and the new ideas they are learning.

Reflection Slides

The most common way we get information about what students are thinking is by asking them to respond to questions orally, either getting them to volunteer answers by raising their hands or cold calling on them at random. These techniques are fast and easy, but they have a limitation: Teachers get information only from a few students, and we’re left wondering what the rest of our class is thinking (and what they know and can do).

Instead of asking students to raise their hands, we can use a multipurpose set of slides over and over as a convenient way for all students in a class to quickly make their thinking visible. Here’s how I suggest doing that:

1. Make a blank set of slides, one slide for each student in your class. Put each student’s name at the top of a slide. (Note: If you don’t want student names on the slides, you can use labels like “Student 1,” “Student 2,” etc., but you’ll need a way to number your students so they know which slide to write on.)

2. Name the set of slides something you’ll remember and can find quickly (e.g., “Period 2 Grade 9 English Reflection Slides”). Make the set of slides editable by anyone (including students).

3. If you know you’ll want to use reflection slides for a class that day, make a copy of that set of slides and rename it using that day’s date (e.g., “Nov. 18 Period 2 Grade 9 English Reflection Slides”). Share an accessible link to that set of reflection slides in your learning management system. (Or use a service like TinyURL or a QR code generator and post the link or code on the whiteboard or somewhere else where it’s easy for students to access it.)

4. During class, when you have a question you want all of the students to answer, you can just tell them to use the link to access the reflection slides. Students can go to their slide and write out their responses to the question you asked them.

If you then want students to think about their classmates’ responses, you can direct them to look through the other responses, and you can even project some sample responses based on student feedback or discussion. You can look through the reflection slides during or after class to get a sense of student responses to your questions during the lesson, and use that information to plan future instruction, gather examples of student thinking, or give feedback to specific students based on their responses.

“Work smarter, not harder” may be a cliché, but it’s a useful reminder, especially for time-starved teachers. We may not have enough time to do everything we want to do for our students, but reusing the materials we’ve already prepared can save time and promote learning.