Better the Lecture
Levels 6-12 Content - Any
It would be an understatement to say that lecturing is frowned upon in modern teaching. At this point it’s almost become a cliché: Don’t be the sage on the stage; be the guide on the side. Ideally, we should stick to supporting students through inquiry, collaborative learning, high quality tasks, and so on. Students need to be active in their learning, but does that mean we dump lectures altogether?
At a time when TED Talks and online courses are incredibly popular, when our students get at least some portion of their instruction through video-based, blended learning platforms, and when most people reading this have probably learned something useful or interesting in the last month from YouTube, aren’t we all learning from lectures all the time?
I’d argue that two factors have given lectures a bad name: overuse and poor execution. (Jennifer Gonzalez, 2022, from 10 Ways for a Better Lecture).
Below please find some evidence based "Pro Tips" to Level Up your Lecture, so all students can access the content and engage in the learning.
PRO TIP 1
Do a Slide Check
Do your lecture slides have:
a clear learning goal (not just the assignment)
minimal text
updated font
visuals that support the learning
frequent stopping point slides for discussion with sentence stems and a talk structure
Check out SlidesGo for modern simple templates.
Read the full Jennifer Gonzalez Make Better Slides post here - templates and ideas included.
PRO TIP 2
Teach students to actively use the graphic organizers that match the learning to take notes
Some of our most powerful instructional tools have been around forever...but have gotten better! In a 2015 study, students who listened to a physics lecture and were given visual aids and organizers ( and were taught to use them) scored nearly 70 percent higher on a follow-up test than their peers who listened to the lecture without the visual aids (from Edutopia). Instead of giving a lecture with a standard slide deck or an outline, present your content in a graphic organizer. This will instantly give students a way to visualize how the concepts are related to each other.
PRO TIP
Plan the structure & the stopping points for practice and student talk.
Research consistently tells us that attention wanes after 10-15 minutes, so limiting lecture length is key. That said, Bradbury (2016, Journal of Physiology) concluded that when lecture is well planned, full of relevant examples, and has frequent stopping points for discussion and processing -- engagement often exceeds 15 minutes.
PRO TIP 2 Incorporate real world examples, phenomena, unexpected stories, and video clips as much as you can.
WATCH AN "IN CLASS LECTURE FLIP"
In which phases of the instructional model might this strategy be used?
