Powerpoint and Guided Notes: When Less is More

I had a powerpoint lesson set to go, with each slide meticulously planned with guided notes, pauses for student questions, which would allow me to move around the room and not be "tied" to the board. Then the projector broke. In my mind, there was utter chaos. How would students stay engaged with material if notes weren't guided? Turns out, they can do it. 

We went through the problems on the board, with simple pencil/paper, and paused to address misunderstandings. Without focusing so much on technology, I actually managed to make more eye contact with students and hold them accountable for engaging with the notes on the board. Also, there seemed to be something about the pace of writing notes as the teacher that worked, instead of having them up on a screen for students to copy. 

The class slowly got into a rhythm, with time for some stories interwoven with the notes (we were doing conditional probability and looking at the chance that someone with obesity gets diabetes versus someone without diabetes). 

One of the most senior teachers (a history teacher) at the school commented to me "I changed my whole curriculum over the past decade to focus on stories." Turns out it can work. Students wanted to know what percent of smokers go on to lung cancer, and what percent of obese people go on to get diabetes. 

For this particular class, it was the stories, the pacing, and the calmness that led to engagement, not technology, or micro-managing slides. I'm reminded of teaching classes with no computers, phones, instructional videos, or "polling questions" using devices while teaching in prisons. Somehow students still learn.