"Lectures should be organized in [ways that aid] comprehension and retention"” (Knight, 2002). That being the case: What is it you want your students to comprehend? What is it you want them to retain? Deciding this before preparing your lecture establishes clear learning objectives.
So—if you could boil it down to one or two essentials—what is it that you most want to have "stick"” in your students’ minds after your lecture? One week later? One month? What do you most want your students to know, or be able to do?
- Solve a particular type of problem?
- Understand the history of a major socio-political issue?
- Explain a specific method for collecting statistical data?
Whatever it is you boil it down to, you have to give it some "sticky." Build your entire lecture around it and strive to avoid getting too far off-task, or message, with tangential digressions.
As with any public speech, your lecture should consist of three main sections: an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion (see tips below). Each should be an iterative tool reinforcing your objective.
Lecture Intros: Don't Just Dive In
First: Tell your students what you're going to tell them.
Too many times professors simply walk into the room and begin their lecture, making no attempt to prepare their students for what to expect in the hour ahead.
The Program for Instructional Innovation at the University of Oklahoma offers the following suggestions:
Prepare your students with a preview of the day’s agenda. Write it on the board for everyone to see. As you preview the agenda, you are sharing with your students the learning objectives and goals you have set for the day.
By providing your students with this information at the beginning of each class, you accomplish at least two things:
- You establish a daily plan. If you get off track, you can easily get back on simply by consulting what you have written on the board.
- You establish daily learning objectives that create the grounds for students to speak up—ask questions—when they don’t “get it.”
Another thing: Reinforce the "Big Picture." That is, at the beginning of each day’s lecture, tie its topics or issues to the last class period and to the rest of the semester. Review daily how the plan for the whole course is unfolding.
Lectures: Structuring the Body
Tell your students what you told them you were going to tell them.
Ideally, before diving in, you will have introduced your students to the topic of your lecture. In other words, you will have told your students what it is you’re going to tell them.
You’ve already decided on your learning objectives: Structuring the body of your lecture is next. It’s time to tell them what you told them you were going to tell them.
Your delivery is critical. Enabling your students’ ability to comprehend and retain the most valuable information is most important. The Program for Instructional Innovation at the University of Oklahoma advises the following:
Chunk the Information
Chunk the body of your lecture into three or four main ideas or issues. This frames your learning objective in a way that enables your students to more readily absorb what they are hearing. It is much easier to comprehend and retain several key items, rather than a long narrative. Too much information too often turns into a long rambling narrative.
Think of these information chunks as hooks. They provide a place to hang the details. When students reflect on what they heard, they will first remember the central issues and key ideas. Recovering, reviewing, and examining the details will follow naturally.
Summarize and Preview
Between the chunks of information—at the natural breaks in your delivery—
look both backwards and forwards. Summarize what you’ve just gone over and preview what’s coming next. Tying the chunks together provides continuity in the flow of your content and builds redundancy into your delivery, a good strategy for reinforcing the main ideas or issues in your lecture.
Lectures: In Conclusion
Tell your students what you just told them
How best to wrap up a lecture? Hmmm.... In your introduction you told your students what you were going to tell them. In the lecture part of the lecture, you went ahead and told them exactly what you told them you were going to tell them. Now what? It’s time to tie things up.
The introduction provided context and the body provided manageable chunks of information. In your conclusion, make sure of one thing—that your students grasp the big picture. Here’s a suggestion from the Program for Instructional Innovation at the University of Oklahoma: Tell them again.
Summarize each chunk of information, tying each to the other so that the day’s lecture makes sense to your students. Give it a cognitive center all its own, a lecture students can comprehend and retain as stand-alone information.
Then expand your conclusion to place the day’s information in a broader context. Explain its significance relative to the larger picture, the overall course. This provides a convenient place to tie the day’s lecture to the previous and to the next, and to inform your students of what they are responsible for before the next class meets.
Source:
Knight, A.B., (n.d.). Lectures: Organizing them and making them interesting. In Ideas on teaching. Retrieved September 2, 2008, from http://www.ou.edu/pii/tips/ideas/lectures.html