How to Make a Lesson Presentation (Shuoke) Deck: 8-Slide Structure

A lesson presentation (shuoke) deck is the short set of slides a teacher uses to present a lesson design to judges or colleagues: what will be taught, why it was designed that way, and how the lesson will unfold. It is not the deck you show students. The dependable way to build one is to follow the standard shuoke flow and condense your written script into eight core slides: the textbook, the learners, objectives, key and difficult points, methods, the teaching process, the board plan, and reflection. Below we cover the format, map it to slides, and use a Grade 3 lesson introducing fractions as a running example.

What shuoke is, and how it differs from teaching

Shuoke (说课, literally "talking about a lesson") is a long-standing format in Chinese schools. Teachers meet it in recruitment interviews, teaching competitions and department reviews. Instead of teaching a class, you stand in front of a panel and walk them through your design, along with the reasoning behind each choice.

The nearest idea in English-speaking schools is presenting your lesson design to an observer before they watch you teach. A demo lesson is different: there you actually teach, to real students or to a panel acting as students. In shuoke the panel wants to hear your thinking.

That is why classroom slides, full of worked examples and practice items, rarely work here. A shuoke deck shows the skeleton of the lesson and the evidence behind it.

The standard flow: eight parts

Requirements vary by region and event, but most shuoke presentations follow the same order:

1. The textbook. Where the lesson sits in the unit and how it connects to what comes before and after.
2. The learners. What students already know, how they think at this age, and where they are likely to struggle.
3. Objectives. Goals grounded in the curriculum standards, the textbook and the learners, written so you could check whether they were met.
4. Key and difficult points. The central idea, the hardest part for students, and how you plan to address each.
5. Teaching and learning methods. The methods you will use, how students will learn, and why these fit the content.
6. The teaching process. Each stage, what students do in it, and the design intent. This is the heart of the presentation.
7. The board plan. What the board will look like and how its layout reflects the structure of the knowledge.
8. Reflection. Problems you anticipate, and how you would adjust.

Some events merge objectives with key points, or the board plan with reflection. That is fine: follow the event or school rules and keep the logical order.

An 8-slide structure for your deck

Give each part one slide and you have the backbone of a shuoke deck. The table below assumes a 15-minute presentation:

In practice you will add a title slide (topic, grade, textbook edition) and may split the teaching process across two or three slides, such as hook and new content, then practice and wrap-up. That brings most decks to around 10 to 12 slides. One warning: some competitions require anonymity, so your name and school cannot appear on the title slide or in a footer. Check before you submit.

For the fractions lesson, slide 1 would note that this is where students first meet fractions formally, laying the foundation for later work on fraction meaning and operations. Slide 2 would say that Grade 3 students can already share things equally but tend to forget that "equal" is the condition that makes a fraction. Slide 4 would name "understanding one part of a whole" as the key point and "seeing that the parts must be equal" as the difficult point, addressed through folding and shading paper strips.

How to manage your time

There is no universal length. Limits commonly range from about 8 to 20 minutes and differ between interviews, school reviews and competitions, so always follow the event or school rules.

Two principles hold regardless of the limit:

• Give the teaching process the most time. It is the core of the presentation, so plan for roughly half of your time there and keep the opening parts brief.
• Rehearse slide by slide. Split your script by slide, note a target time for each, and rehearse with a timer. A frequent cause of running over is reading curriculum text aloud in the first two parts.

If you only have 8 to 10 minutes, merge the textbook and learners into one slide and the board plan and reflection into another. That leaves about six core slides.

What reviewers usually look for

Scoring rules differ between events and schools, so treat the points below as general guidance for self-review and defer to the published criteria of your event:

• Grounding. Are objectives, key points and methods tied to the curriculum standards, the textbook and real students, or are they generic lines about "developing core skills"?
• Checkable objectives. "Understand fractions" is hard to check. "Can show one half of a shape by folding paper" is not.
• A plan for the hard part. Naming the difficult point is not enough. Reviewers want to hear which activity and materials will get students past it.
• A logical process. How the stages connect, what students do in each, and whether the design intent comes through.
• Methods that fit. Listing six methods is weaker than explaining why two of them suit this lesson.
• Delivery. Fluent speech, staying within time, and talking to the panel rather than reading from the screen.

Design rules for shuoke slides

Put keywords on screen, not your script. Your script is what you say. The slide holds keywords and structure, around five lines of body text, so reviewers can glance at it while they listen to you.

Show the teaching process as a flow. This slide tends to turn into a wall of text. Draw it left to right instead: one box per stage with the stage name and student activity, and the design intent in smaller type underneath.

Tie every design choice to its basis. On the objectives, key points and methods slides, add a short basis tag to each item, such as "Basis: curriculum standard for Grades 3–4" or "Basis: students can already share equally". This is exactly what separates presenting a lesson design from teaching it.

Draw the real board. The board plan slide should look like the board will look, with title, keywords and diagrams in place, not a paragraph describing it.

Keep one template and few animations. Use one layout and type scale throughout, and reserve animation for revealing the process one stage at a time.

For general guidance on type size and how much to put on a slide, see what makes good classroom slides.

Building the deck with AI

With your script or lesson design written, AI can handle structure and layout while you rehearse. Our AI slide studio produces high-quality, editable decks, and the workflow looks like this:

1. Bring your text. Open the courseware studio and paste your script or lesson design (up to 100,000 characters), upload a .docx, .txt or .md file, or import a web page by URL. PDF upload is not supported, so copy the text out of a PDF and paste it in.
2. Pick the school stage. Options cover kindergarten, Grades 1–3, Grades 4–6, middle school, high school, and university or vocational education, so wording and depth match the level you teach.
3. Edit the outline. The AI first drafts a slide-by-slide outline with titles and key points, and making the outline costs 0 credits. Rename slides to the eight shuoke parts, delete anything aimed at students, reorder as needed, and the deck is generated with exactly that structure.
4. Choose a style. There are 100+ styles, including 26 curated Chinese templates. Clean layouts with plenty of white space suit shuoke. You can also set the output language, which helps if you present in English. If the event requires anonymity, skip any brand kit that adds a school logo or footer.
5. Generate. Each slide costs 2 credits with AI images included, and the total is shown before you generate. A 10-slide deck costs about 20 credits and usually takes 1 to 3 minutes.
6. Export and rehearse. Export an editable PPTX, then in PowerPoint or WPS add your basis tags, adjust the board sketch, and rehearse slide by slide with a timer. Export a PDF copy as well, in case the venue computer is missing your fonts.

If you are starting from a full lesson design rather than a shuoke script, see how lesson design to slides works. Teaching teams preparing together can also use batch mode to process up to 20 documents at once.

Final checks before you present

Run through this list once the deck is done:

• Read only the slide titles. Do they trace the eight parts in order?
• Does every objective and key point have a basis and a plan?
• Is the teaching process a flow diagram rather than paragraphs?
• Do anonymity, slide count and timing match the event rules?
• Are both the PPTX and the PDF on your USB drive?

To see real output, open the Grade 3 fractions courseware example and consider how its classroom slides would become design explanations on the eight slides above. If you also need the classroom deck for the same lesson, read how to turn a lesson plan into slides or explore the AI courseware workflow.

A shuoke tests how deeply you understand one lesson. Let tools handle the structure, and spend your preparation on explaining why you teach the way you do.

FAQ

How many slides should a shuoke deck have?

There is no fixed rule. A common approach is eight core slides plus a title slide, with the teaching process split across two or three slides when it is long, for about 10 slides in total. Match the count to your time limit, merge parts when time is short, and follow the event or school rules.

Can I reuse my classroom slides for a shuoke?

Not as they are. Classroom slides are built for students and focus on content and activities, while a shuoke deck is built for reviewers and needs to show your design reasoning. You can borrow one or two classroom slides as illustrations on the teaching process slide, but organize the deck around the shuoke flow.

My script is a PDF. Can I upload it?

PDF upload is not supported. Copy the text from the PDF and paste it into the input box, or save it as .docx or .txt and upload that. Then review the outline and map the slide titles to the shuoke parts before generating.

Can I present the AI-generated deck as it is?

Treat it as a first draft. AI can handle structure, layout and images, but the basis for each choice, your plan for the difficult point and the board sketch reflect your own thinking. Check and complete them yourself, and confirm slide count, timing and anonymity against the event rules.