Interactive Lecture

Lectures are often discouraged because they are teacher centered, minimize student inquiry, and treat knowledge as something to be passively consumed rather than something needed to exercise higher order thinking.

Nevertheless, lectures remain a staple of secondary education. In many subjects, well designed and brief lectures can be a useful way of providing background knowledge or context that provides students the tools to engage in more inquiry oriented pedagogies. The following structure for interactive lectures can mitigate some of the limitations of the traditional lecture:

Pre-requisites: Effective interactive lectures should be connected to an essential question. The purpose of the essential question is to make clear that the lecture is not disconnected knowledge, but is required information to aid in answering a question. Further, the interactive lecture should build towards performance tasks. (See Understanding by Design).

The interactive lecture elements:

  1. Prepare students for the lecture by “hooking” their attention with a provocative question or activity, allowing them to jot down and compare ideas with a partner (“kindling”), and then building a “bridge” between student responses and the new content.

  2. Distribute, or work with students to create, a visual organizer.

  3. Present information multi modally using auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and/or emotive cues to make information vivid and memorable.

  4. Structure for frequent engagement, stopping the presentation every five minutes or so to allow students to review and process learning by posing questions that engage different styles of thinking (see participation strategies and questioning techniques).

  5. Allow students to evaluate and reflect on the content and the process of the lesson, building their metacognition.

  6. Assess learning using a synthesis task that requires students to apply concepts.

Interactive lectures may be a lesson form in and of itself, or may be used as a part of another lesson form (i.e. as a mini-lesson in the workshop model or in the modeling phase of a 5 part lesson.)

Source: Silver, H., & Strong, R. (2007). Chapter 1: The new American lecture. In The strategic teacher: Selecting the right research-based strategy for every lesson. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.