Local Navigation
Other Pages
Planning a Lecture
April 3, 2012
Strategies that make ideas stick
Do students sometimes smile and nod while you present an important idea in class and then seem unable to explain it or seem to forget it entirely shortly afterward? Heath and Heath (2010) present 6 strategies that make new ideas more memorable.
- Simplify ideas without trivializing them. Avoid turning on a fire hose of information during a lecture. Prioritize and identify the critical core ideas and focus on clearly presenting a small number of new ideas. Students need your expertise to identify the key concepts they should attend to and learn. Anchor core ideas in information and context that students already know. Use examples, analogies, and models that students already understand and can use as the foundation for new ideas and understanding.
- Create surprise and curiosity to capture and hold attention. Introduce a topic by posing a question, presenting a puzzle or problem to be solved, or identifying a gap in knowledge that can be filled by the new ideas you will discuss.
- Use concrete examples. Ground new abstract ideas in specific, concrete analogies and examples. Concrete examples are easier to understand than purely abstract concepts. Each concrete sensory component associated with a concept will serve as mechanism for recalling the idea later. If students learn redundant retrieval cues, if one retrieval cue fails, another cue might be successful.
- Ideas must be credible to be memorable. Present new ideas in a way that allows students to imagine or experience a credible test of the ideas. Demonstrations and active learning experiences are effective strategies for creating credible tests.
- Memorable ideas make an emotional impact. Students are more likely to remember ideas they care about. Why should students care about the new idea you want them to learn? Why is it important? Surprise can be the emotional hook that makes a new concept memorable. Examples of real-world consequences that are important to students will also make new ideas more memorable.
- Narratives are more memorable than lists. Embed new content in a story or simulation. The story does not have to be a compelling piece of fiction to make the embedded ideas memorable. The story only needs to create a meaningful organization that highlights how the new ideas relate to one another. Ideas that are connected to one another are more memorable than a disconnected list of topics.
Heath and Heath illustrate the narrative strategy by contrasting how well students learn the concepts from a series of lectures on various accounting practices (identifying revenue, computing current assets) to students who learned these concepts in the context of a story about two fictional students who launched a start-up company for a new product.
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2007). Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die. Random House.
Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2010). Teaching that sticks. PDF file available from www.heathbrothers.com
February 28, 2012
Focus learning by beginning a lecture with a question or thinking prompt
Lectures are an efficient way to communicate a large amount of content in a fixed period of time. Unfortunately, “telling” (the main activity in many lectures) does not translate directly into “learning” (the main goal for most faculty who prepare and deliver lectures). Students sometimes become lost in the forest of content details in lectures and fail to extract the larger picture that reflects how these details are integrated. Students will be more likely to recall specific content details if they begin with an overarching organization that creates context and suggests how details relate to one another.
Providing an organizational theme or structure before presenting content improves comprehension and facilitates recall of content details. For example, Bransford and Johnson (1973) asked students to read and recall a short text that described 18 details associated with a common activity (e.g., First you arrange things into different groups. . . . If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities, that is the next step. . . . it is better to do too few things at once than too many. . . . After the procedure is completed, one arranges the materials into different groups again.). When students were told that the passage was about washing laundry before they read the passage, they recalled twice as many details than when they learned about the theme of the passage after reading it.
Instructors can facilitate comprehension of their lectures and improve student recall of lecture content by providing a question, thinking prompt, or other organizing theme before beginning the lecture. Write the question or prompt on the board where it will be visible throughout the lecture. Include it in the first slide of a power point presentation. Instructors should direct attention to the prompt as students enter and prepare to listen to the lecture. Some instructors will ask students to write a short paragraph in response to the prompt before the lecture begins to encourage students to complete assigned readings before class. Refer to the question or prompt at relevant points during the lecture to reinforce the theme that connects content of the lecture in a coherent whole.
Bergey, B. (n.d.) Making it stick: How to design engaging and effective learning activities. Workshop handout, Teaching & Learning Center, Temple University.
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1973). Consideration of some problems of comprehension. In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Silberman, M. (1996). Active learning: 101 strategies to teach any subject. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
This tip is based in part on a suggestion by Bradley Bergey, Teaching & Learning Center, Temple University.
November 29, 2011
Engaging students through interactive lectures
For over 500 years, lecture has been associated with teaching in higher education. In the medieval university, texts were rare and expensive. Instructors read texts aloud so that students could hear and take notes on them. During the renaissance, the practice of lecturing referred to public instructional discourse, with or without the reading of texts. In nineteenth century America, orators like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Jennings Bryan grafted rhetorical skills honed at the pulpit with the academic tradition and raised lecture to an art form. The Chautauqua tradition of delivering polished, engaging, public lectures treated the lecture as a means for both public enlightenment and entertainment. Roosevelt claimed that Chautauqua lectures were "the most American thing in America."
The recent focus on collaborative learning and student engagement, bolstered by research findings that document the value of specific strategies to improve the retention of complex information, raises questions about the value of lectures as the primary mode of instruction. Is lecture truly an ineffective method for learning and teaching? The most correct answer is, "It depends." There are times when lecture may be the most appropriate instructional strategy to use.
When used properly, lecture can be an effective and enjoyable pedagogy. When used incorrectly or over-used, it can become a stumbling block to learning. The following guidelines will improve the value of lecture for promoting effective student learning:
- Insure that the instructional purpose and material is well suited to the lecture format. Use lecture to create initial motivation in students to study the material, disperse largely informational material, or frame a discussion in a particular way.
- Design the class period to interleave 10-15 minutes mini-lectures with activities that help students focus, process, question and re-engage. This lecture strategy is called an interactive lecture. The instructor interweaves lecture with activities using tools such as concept tests, clicker questions, short quizzes, pair-share activities for peer mentoring, and other Classroom Assessment Techniques (Angelo & Cross, 1993).
- An instructor who wants to use lectures effectively must possess polished presentation and rhetorical skills. Prepare the lecture ahead of time. Identify key points and the means for making effective transitions between ideas. Collect examples and stories to illustrate key points. Develop a presentation style that is pleasant and clear. Avoid distracting mannerisms. Integrate appropriate humor, graphics or other presentation aids into the lecture to capture and maintain attention.
- Avoid making the use of lecture the default instructional strategy. Select lecture as an instructional strategy because it fulfills specific instructional goals. Select other strategies to meet other instructional goals.
This tip is based on a contribution from Devan Barker, Instructional Development, Brigham Young University Idaho (http://www.byui.edu/).
Angelo, T., & Cross, P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
November 1, 2011
Use learning outcomes to organize class lectures and lessons and focus student attention
Begin developing a class lecture or plan for the class discussion with the specific student learning outcomes you intend to promote during that lecture. This approach will shift your focus from pure content coverage to student learning and understanding. Students have difficulty separating the essential course content from other content included in a lecture. If you clearly identify three or four main concepts and how these are related to one another as the primary goal of a given class session, you can focus the class discussion and activities on those key learning outcomes. Packing more content into a 50-minute block of time does not necessarily lead to more student learning or guarantee retention or understanding of all of the content presented. Students benefit from class time spent engaging in content-related problem solving and activities that require them to integrate content into a larger, coherent representation of how content is related to larger course questions and themes.
Want to learn more about backward course design?
Fink, D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Nilson, L. B. (2007). The graphic syllabus and the outcomes map: Communicating your course. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.
Tip based on suggestions included in Sibley, J., and Canuto, L. (2010). Guide to teaching for new faculty at UBC. Available at http://issuu.com/ubc-aspc-cis/docs/faculty_guide-2010
October 18, 2011
Create graphic organizers to improve student learning in large lectures
A graphic organizer or set of essential questions provides an overall organization for material that instructors discuss during a lecture. Cognitive research has demonstrated that individuals retain more information when they have a structure that organizes the new information. Mnemonic devices often depend on existing learned structures to organize new learning and function as reliable retrieval cues for new information. When organizing structures are also related to the relations between newly-learned concepts, these structures promote understanding and articulation of these meaningful relations as well as retrieval of content (Bransford & Johnson, 1973; Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999).
Organize your lecture on a given day around a big-picture question or relation between concepts that can be illustrated through a graphic organizer. The organizer can take the form of a concept map, a matrix or grid, a flow chart, or a list of 3 or 4 key questions. If instructors provide the basic structure as a handout (distributed at the start of class or posted in D2L for printing before class), students can use the organizer while taking class notes. Alternatively, students might rework notes taken during class to incorporate key points into the appropriate areas of the graphic organizer. Both exercises will help students identify the key concepts and details discussed during class and integrate these individual details into a coherent whole.
Tip based on suggestions included in Sibley, J., and Canuto, L. (2010). Guide to teaching for new faculty at UBC. Available at http://issuu.com/ubc-aspc-cis/docs/faculty_guide-2010
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (1999). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1973). Considerations of some problems of comprehension. In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Updated 04/03/12 cdw