Lecture Tips

I encourage everyone to read McKeachie’s chapter on lecturing, which is also the principle text of our teaching certification program that is currently being beta tested. Here are five tips to take into consideration before giving your next lecture:

1. Interject information into a lecture that you are excited about because the research has found that enthusiastic teachers tend to move around the class and have greater eye contact which will prolong the attention span of the students beyond the typical 12 – 20 minutes where basic lecturing techniques are used.

2. Avoid giving students a steady succession of new concepts to give them a chance to take proper notes; this is important because research has shown that those students who take notes remember more material than those that do not. Besides, note taking is a more complex cognitive process than one may realize. The student has to first connect the material that is being presented to information stored in long term memory in order to comprehend what is being said by the lecturer and hold it in working memory long enough to write it down. So when lecturing build in redundancies so that students will get the basic points that need to be covered in a variety of ways and at various times during the lecture to help them take better notes.

3. Do NOT use the lecture to offer up a systematic, condensed version of the knowledge that is to be conveyed in the class covering outside readings, the assigned chapter, etc. The goal should be to teach students to learn and think by delivering lectures that are designed to analyze the course materials, formulate good questions, solve problems, challenge conventional wisdom, and so forth. So when planning the lecture don’t start by asking yourself what should be covered as much as determining what you really want the students to remember long term.

4. You cannot simply explain concepts to students during the lecture in hopes that they will comprehend them as you had intended; you must provide examples. Believe it or not, the words you use in a lecture to describe something may not be pictured the same way by each and every student whether the class has 5 or 50 students; in fact there are students who cannot picture things in their mind at all.

5. It is futile to cover the material at all costs. If time is winding down on the class and you suddenly realize that you still have 3 overhead transparencies do not rush through them pretending to be a speed talker. The simple truth is just because you said it does not mean the students learned it.

McKeachie's book is entitled: Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers, published by Houghton Mifflin.