At the recent Washington Food Coalition conference, I presented four sessions. Each one had its own workbook with core content, fill-in-the-blank lines, and space for reflections. By the last day, a food bank leader who had attended all four sessions came up to me with a smile: “I just loved the workbooks. They helped me process what I was learning.”
She didn’t ask for the slides. She valued the workbooks — tools designed for note-making, not just note-taking. They invited her to connect ideas, mark what mattered, and make sense of the content in her own way.
When our first speaker in our fall series didn’t share his slides, my training colleague Robyn Steely sent me two papers on slides as learning tools. They confirm what we’ve been teaching and modeling through our use of workbooks in lieu of slide-sharing.
What the research says
What the research says
A 2018 study published in Computers & Education tested students with three kinds of slide access:
- Full slides: everything on the screen.
- Partial slides: intentional blanks to fill in.
- No slides: students took their own notes.
The results:
- Students with no slides performed best overall.
- Partial slides boosted long-term retention compared to full slides.
- Quantity of notes didn’t matter. What mattered was “note-making” — the use of markers like bullets, arrows, and diagrams that showed organization and connections.
Interestingly, students still preferred having slides. (Those pesky preferences. I wrote about them last month.) Students believed slides helped them focus, even when performance data suggested otherwise. A broader review of studies since the 1990s shows the same pattern: slides can support attention but rarely improve understanding or recall unless learners actively transform the information.
What you can do differently
- Rethink full decks. Instead of sending 40 slides, provide a one-page checklist or a workbook that supports application. (Need an example? I was just looking today at this advocacy training and its workbook.)
- Use partial slides. Leave blanks for key ideas so learners engage in filling them in.
- Encourage note-making. Prompt participants to circle, underline, or draw connections in their notes.
- Honor preferences but explain. (Tips here.) Acknowledge the desire for slides while providing tools that better support long-term retention.
“Will you be sharing the slides?” is on every trainer’s BINGO card. What is a webinar without someone sliding it into the chat box. The question has become habit. The learning it offers has become illusory. The question isn’t going away — but maybe it can open a new kind of conversation about other ways we can help them learn, remember, and take action.
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