Practical things to try

Wow, welcome back. Now, if you’re going to be effective with your lectures, there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind. Number one, you’ve already talked about the fact that we shouldn’t be lecturing all the time, we should be doing more mini-lectures. But even with a mini-lecture, that’s 10 to 12 minutes, it’s important to establish good strategies to help students to be engaged in the learning process. It’s amazing with a bad lecture, how long 10 minutes is, so you’re going to want to do it well.

Now, the 10 to 12 minutes framework that we’re going to be looking at is a setup so you lecture for the 10 to 12 minutes, and then you do an active learning strategy. Now these active learning strategies that come along oftentimes are considered by many people to be breaks. That is, you’ll hear this, you lecture for 10 to 12 minutes, and then you give them an activity so they have a break. That is a terrible concept.

See, most times with humans, there’s a concept of cognitive load, and that’s a fancy way of saying how much information you can handle at any given time. And anytime you’re learning something new, after 10 to 12 minutes, you’ve got plenty. So you’re not taking breaks. We’re lecturing for 10 to 12 minutes. And then we’re giving students an opportunity to integrate that information in some active way. 10 to 12 minutes of information, then learning activation solidification. So that makes those breaks, as some people call them, some of the most important parts of the course.

But to set those breaks or active learning strategies up, you need good lectures. So it’s important to keep four things in mind. Number one, identify your desired outcome for that mini-lecture. Two, capture the students attention and create interest in the material about to be presented. Three, activate prior knowledge, so the learner has something unto which they can anchor the new material and four, promote reflection. Let’s go into those, just a hair more for just a second to make sure we’ve got them.

That first one was to make sure that we identify our desired outcomes for the mini-lecture. For every mini-lecture, know what it is that the learner should be able to do or what they should know at the end of that small chunk. If you have a firm destination in mind, it’s much easier for the students to get to where you want them to go.

Number two, we were going to capture the learner’s attention. So think of an attention getter. Television programs, movies, books, TED talks, all do the same thing. In the first 30 seconds to a minute, they do something to snare you in there. They want to make sure that they have your attention, so you’ll want to pay attention. For each mini-lecture, find something that creates curiosity, provides a bit of uncertainty that you’re going to answer later. Then also connect with the students. At times, I’ve asked students to come up with those attention getters, for example, assign students a block of material to which they’re supposed to find a YouTube clip. They submit it to you, you review it and you can use that as an attention getter.

Now the third thing was to make sure to activate prior knowledge. Bring up the material learned in the last class period. Make sure that you present something that all students are likely to have experienced or refer to assigned class material that was just on a quiz. The point is to get their brains oriented to what is known so that you can then extend into new areas.

And number four, it’s important to promote reflection. At least once in your mini-lecture and preferably towards the end, prompt students to think about what was just learned. One way of doing this is to ask a hypothetical question. You could ask, for example, if they were working on a bridge design, “What did you learn today that could actually save people’s lives?” Another thing that could be worked on is family dynamics. If you have a family with a couple, oftentimes a couple will think they each provide more than 50% to the relationship. Although that’s not possible, it happens all the time. You can ask your students. “Why might individuals think that way?”

So overall, if you can get these four concepts into your lectures, the lectures are going to be very good and good lectures promote student learning.