Welcome to this course on ‘Classroom Practice: Engaged Lecturing’ which has been developed with Todd D. Zakrajsek.
Click here to view the video transcript
Hi, I’m Todd Zakrajsek. I work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. I’ve been here for about 10 years, I’m a Research Associate Professor. My research background is industrial organisational psychology with cognitive and social psychology as a background. Most of my work has actually done with faculty members, and what I do is help faculty members to teach better. The overarching outcome we really want, of course, is student learning, so the best way to get to really good student learning is to help faculty be better teachers.
Although the lecture is often held up as a passive and ineffective instructional strategy, that widely held view is not supported by evidence. There exist many excellent examples of mini lectures as an effective form of teaching. Lecturing of any length must have certain elements to be engaging and effective. Those elements include stimulating student interest in the topic, helping students to retrieve prior knowledge, and encouraging reflection to solidify newly learned information.
By the end of this course, you will be able to defend the statement that, when done properly, lecturing is not only an effective way to teach, but also an engaged learning strategy.
Click here to view the video transcript
Hi, welcome to the course. Now, this course is on engaging lecturing. Now, many people see the lecture as very passive, and that is not true at all. All learning is an active process. Now, mini-lectures are used all the time, and nobody claims that those are passive and not of value. So what we’re going to be doing today is looking at a little bit longer lectures, and how can you make them engaging. Now, to be engaging, lectures have to contain a few things. We have to look and make sure that there’s student interest. If students are not interested in the topic, they’re certainly not going to be engaged. We have to make sure we can retrieve prior knowledge. Research shows over and over again if you retrieve prior knowledge, it helps with the learning process, and that retrieval process will bring up for your students things, again, that they’re interested in. And the last one is we have to encourage reflection. If students aren’t reflecting on what they’re learning, they’re not very engaged. The other part of that, of course, is when you’re lecturing, if you give them questions and reasons to reflect, then what you’re going to find is that the students are more engaged in the process. Now, by the end of this course, you’re going to be able to defend that lecturing is actually equal to engaged learning, and I hope you have a good time in the process.
“Talking to the students about the effectiveness of the engaged lecture and ways in which students can better facilitate their own learning will increase the amount learned.”
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