Effective Lecture Practices. Without fail the most common area of curricular concern I hear from SPHTM faculty has to do with keeping students engaged, motivated, and/or participating during class.
The college lecture, I’ve been told, can be both frightening and comforting in its familiarity. But there are plenty of instances where information must be transmitted orally to a passive, listening audience. Research as far back as 1984 has shown that after 10 to 20 minutes of continuous lecture, assimilation falls off rapidly. Listed below are a few ways to strengthen the effectiveness of those 50-minute sessions.
- Lecture/Rhetorical Questioning: Talk in 7- to 10-minute segments, pause, ask pre-planned, rhetorical questions. Learners record their answers in their notes.
- Surveys with Exemplifier: Pause, ask directly for a show of hands: “Raise your hand if you agree…disagree…etc.” Ask for a volunteer to speak for each response group.
- Turn to Your Partner and…: Pause, ask students to turn to the person next to them, and share examples of the point just made or complete a given phrase or sentence.
- Halting Time: Present complex material or directions and then stop so learners have time to think or carry out directions. Visually check to see whether the class appears to understand. If they do, continue.
- Explication de Texte: By reading and analyzing passages from the text aloud, learners can see higher-order thinking skills and that “criticism” is a legitimate intellectual exercise.
- Guided Lecture: Students listen to 15-20 minutes of lecture without taking notes. At the end, they spend five minutes recording all they can recall. The next step involves learners in small discussion groups reconstructing the lecture conceptually with supporting data, preparing complete lecture notes, using the instructor to resolve questions that arise.
- Immediate Mastery Quiz: When a regular immediate mastery test is included in the last few minutes of the period, learners retain almost twice as much material, both factual and conceptual.
- Story Telling: Stories, metaphor, and myth catch people deeply within, so no longer are listeners functioning as tape recorders subject to the above information overload limits. What human beings have in common is revealed in myth. Stories allow the listener to seek an experience of being alive in them and find clues to answers within themselves. The 10- to 20-minute limit no longer applies.
- Snowball: Instead of starting class with “teaching by telling,” ask a question that leads to what you want students to learn. Then:
- Each individual writes down their thoughts without reference to others.
- Students then share what they have written in pairs or threes.
- Optionally the pairs or threes combine to create larger groups which again compares their answers, and then agrees a group answer.
- The teacher asks each big group in turn for one idea they have had and writes the useful ideas on the board, perhaps saying a little in support of each idea.
— Angela Breckenridge
