TRAINING and EDUCATION
I spoke about MD/MBAs, I didn’t have a de-
tailed description outlining the path to an MBA
on the slide; I had an image of a graduate.
Next is the third step: Practice, practice, and
practice. Repeat as necessary. The key to a suc-
cessful PechaKucha presentation is rehearsing it
until your timing is impeccable. If you go under
your 20 seconds on a slide, there’s an uncom-
fortable silence; if you go over, you’re forced to
play catch up.
Chitchat in the Classroom
The PowerPoint presentation is second nature
for most of us. Leaving it behind for a new
format can be daunting, but the style is ideal
for the evolving medical education landscape.
In my experience, students love it. Let’s face it:
most students don’t attend classes anyway – and
I don’t blame them. Why go to class if the only
reason is to listen to a professor talk at you?
Why attend a session at a medical meeting if
the only reason is to listen to a researcher read
from a slide?
practice – alone and in front of people – and
they realize that they can do it. They set their
computer to advance slides automatically,
they practice their timing, they say, “Hmm,
this slide doesn’t work like I thought,” and
they replace it.
I have found that it’s easy to get people to
buy into the concept when they see it in ac-
tion. So, to overcome people’s fears, focus on
the advantages: You’ll have tons of practice,
you’ll never have to apologize for a busy slide,
and, although it might seem terrifying at first,
in the end, you’re only up on stage for 6 min-
utes and 40 seconds. It goes quickly.
SIDEBAR
Examples from Dr. Kahn’s
Blood Drop talk at
ASH-a-Palooza
Coming Soon to a Meeting Near You?
The PechaKucha format is used to convey all
types of information; there’s no reason that
it can’t be used to present oral abstracts at
a medical meeting. The relatively rapid-fire
format of oral abstract sessions – 15 minutes
to present data, plus a question-and-answer
session – lends itself to the lightning-talk
With a PechaKucha-style presentation,
you’ll have tons of practice, you’ll never
have to apologize for a busy slide, and
you’re only up on stage for 6 minutes
and 40 seconds. It goes quickly.
From an educational perspective, PechaKucha
is a way of taking what might be a mundane
PowerPoint presentation and making it user
friendly. The concept is a shift from lecturing at
an audience for an hour to facilitating a conver-
sation so that they engage with the information.
For many of today’s learners with short atten-
tion spans, it makes sense.
For example, if I am planning a medical
school class about acute leukemia, I would con-
sider putting together a PechaKucha presenta-
tion on that topic, recording it, and making
it available to students to watch before the next
class. Hopefully, by the time they come to class,
they have already spent the 6 minutes and 40
seconds viewing the presentation and have a
base knowledge of leukemia physiology, so we
can spend our class time discussing what they
learned and they can ask follow-up questions.
This enables a more informed, interactive con-
versation – rather than spending that time lec-
turing at them.
Grand rounds are another perfect op-
portunity to introduce the PechaKucha pre-
sentation style. Instead of one lecturer, invite
five or six people to present a series of short
talks. At Tulane University, we are planning to
implement PechaKucha–style grand rounds
this semester.
Senior faculty might be initially resistant to
this novel concept, but we’ve found that every-
one eventually comes around to the idea. They
ASHClinicalNews.org
format. Again, the time-limited PechaKucha
style forces speakers to focus on the most
important information in their talks, so it is a
phenomenal format for oral abstracts.
Also, consider your audience: At a medical
conference, you’re pretty much talking with
clinicians who have the requisite knowledge to
understand your data. We tend to add intro-
duction and background slides to our Power-
Point presentations – which often are the
slides with the most text – but odds are that
your audience already knows enough to follow
your talk.
In a way, PechaKucha also forces the au-
dience to pay attention. We have all seen it at
today’s medical meetings: As soon as a slide
goes up, so do audience members’ phones
and tablets as they take photos that they will
refer to later. To me, that means they’re not
listening to what the speaker is actually say-
ing. With the PechaKucha format, audience
members are looking and listening more in-
tently to the speaker. First, because they want
to see if you can do it, and second, because
it’s much easier to hold someone’s attention
for 6 minutes and 40 seconds than it is to
hold it for an hour. With PechaKucha, less is
more: Less talking and more learning. ●
ASH Clinical News
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