Yesterday I spoke to 6 grade 12’s taking a new Teacher Education course in our school. I had a framework built for my talk in PowerPoint, but just text on a plain white background. I had calendared an hour before the presentation to add some images and touch it up. But as I added the first couple images, I realized that I really didn’t need them.

There are only 6 students, my second and third slides were question that I wanted them to answer and I would add their answers to the slides, and the 1-3 bullets on the other slides were not as much talking points but cues for me to share experiences as examples of what I was going to speak about.

It occurred to me that the images were not going to add anything except cosmetics. I think sometimes presentations become more about the flash and imagery than about the message.

If I were to be presenting to a filled auditorium, I might have thought more about beautifying my slides, but it’s easy to see whether or not I’ve got the attention of 6 kids. It’s easy to ask them questions and feel like I’m giving everyone a chance to respond. And it’s easy to make the presentation more of a conversation.

I presented to 6 kids who could all probably make better slides than me after three and a half years at a school that has them presenting weekly, and explicitly teaches them about visual messaging…. And I shared 10 slides with black printing on a white background. Reflecting now, that’s all I really needed.