Lecturing can be an effective way of transmitting information, particularly when students have very little background in the subject matter. Lectures can also be inspiring, model thinking processes, and present material that is not available elsewhere.
However, traditional lectures tend to involve one-way communication, with student questions as time permits. Interactive or feedback lectures are structured around two-way communication.
Interactive lectures continually refocus student attention.
A major flaw of the traditional lecture method is that it is limited by the listener’s ability and desire to sustain concentration and focus. Hence, the interactive lecture seeks to actively involve students in a variety of ways that will maintain student attention and focus.
Another limitation of traditional lectures is that they involve little feedback from students. Interactive lectures involve communication between faculty and students so that the lecturer knows if students are understanding the material, and more importantly, how well students are understanding it.
The prior knowledge that students bring to the lecture can enhance or interfere with learning. When lectures involve feedback from students, the lecturer can identify and correct misconceptions in student thinking that would otherwise interfere with learning.
1. Pre and Post-Tests: Before the lecture begins, students can be given a 3-5 question quiz or asked to list 3-5 points they would cover in an essay on a particular question. If students are provided access to correct or sample answers, the tests can be self-scoring. These tests can help focus student attention on key ideas and provide feedback to students on whether or not they understand the material. (This can work for online instruction, too.)
2. Attention Span Breaks: After every ten to twenty minutes of your lecture pose a question that summarizes the subtopic or foreshadows the next portion of the lecture. Or, you could ask students to vote on an opinion question relevant to your topic. In pairs, you might ask students to provide a written example appropriate to your topic, collect them, and discuss a few that are either excellent or erroneous examples.
3. Reflecting on and Improving Note-taking, a three-lecture technique: Provide a triple-spaced outline of your lecture as a guide for student note-taking. After 20 minutes, ask students to compare their notes with two other people in the class. Give the next 20 minutes of the lecture without an outline, then ask students to compare their notes with the same two classmates. For the next lecture, provide an outline for only half the lecture but follow the same procedures as above, having students compare notes twice during the lecture. At the beginning of the third lecture, conduct a short discussion as to what students learned from comparing notes. Have students compare notes once a week thereafter. You may want to join in and take a look at some of their notes as well.
4. Checking Student Understanding: After 15-25 minutes of lecturing (or after a page or two of an online, textual lecture) ask students to respond to one or two questions. Vary the questions, sometimes asking questions that check comprehension or summarize main points, other times asking students to apply, analyze, or evaluate conceptual material.
5. Think-Pair-Share: This is a cooperative learning technique that can has dramatic results. After a bit of lecturing, ask a multiple-choice question that is fact-based or checks student comprehension. After counting the vote to each choice, ask students to pair-up and explain their answers, then take the vote again. Almost inevitably the number of votes for the right answer increases dramatically.
6. Making Material Relevant: After lecturing on an idea or concept, stop and ask students for examples from their own experiences or readings. Or, you might show a news clip or a movie segment and ask students how it relates to the lecture material. The variety of student perceptions can be amazing and provide the instructor with feedback about how students think.
7. Changing People’s Minds: Lectures have been shown to be fairly ineffective at changing people’s attitudes or values. Discussion and concrete experiences are better for meeting these types of learning goals. When appropriate, ask students to discuss or write you a note at the end of class discussing how the course material has affected their thinking or beliefs.
8. Discussion Questions: At some point during the lecture, groups of 2-4 students respond to a carefully prepared and written out discussion question. It is extremely useful to give students the type of discussion question that they might find on an exam as a short answer to essay question.
9. Group Activities: A variation on discussion is to provide a small group activity instead of a discussion question. For example, students could be asked to fill out a comparison chart between philosophers discussed in the lecture, list the causes of an event noted in the lecture, define terms used in lecture in their own words, or list attributes of theories identified in the lecture.
10. Summarizing and Evaluating: At the end of the lecture or a lecture segment, ask students to summarize or evaluate the lecture in a short paragraph. Take these home and flip thought them. You will learn much.
Orient Students. When using an interactive lecture with students who are unfamiliar with this type of lecture, it is important to provide a short orientation describing what you are going to be expecting of them and why. Students, especially need to know that you are requiring their participation for a reason, the more specific the better. Orienting students to changes in instruction are vital to the success of any new technique or teaching strategy.
Begin Simply. Ask students to participate in small ways in the beginning, adding more activity as the lecture and the course progress.
Begin with Interactivity. It is best to break-the-ice at the beginning of the course and from the beginning of each lecture. For example, if you begin with a motivational story, ask students to do something or in someway respond to that story. In pairs or in large groups, they might tell each other about a similar experience in their own lives, to explain how the story relates to the reading assignment, or to identify aspects of the story that exemplifies a particular concept. When teaching online, students can respond in a chat room, on a bulletin board, or in an email to you.
Have a Purpose. To be effective, interactivity needs to be purposeful; and it is best if the purpose is made clear to students. In the example above, the instructor’s purpose might be to get students to know one another, to get them thinking in a certain way about the lecture material, or to make it clear that they are expected read the assignment before coming to class. In addition, the online instructor might want to provide students with an experience in using the chat room.
Let Students Know the Purpose. Be sure to explicitly let students know your purposes. You may think that your purposes and expectations are self-evident. They usually are not. Students can think of reasons you hadn’t thought about or they may think there is no good reason at all!
State Your Purpose in Terms of Student Learning. The purpose of your lecture may be to analyze a particular theory. In terms of student learning, your purpose might be for students to be able to compare and contrast two theories, one of which you analyzed in last week’s lecture.