Lecturing

Lecturing is the most widespread form of teaching in higher education. With increasing class sizes and the pressure to put subjects online it is important to give attention to ways you can help students get the most from their lectures. Lectures can do more than provide students with information they could gain using suitably devised handouts or web notes. What is the value added by lectures?

Benefits of Lectures

Learning involves changes in understanding. Lectures provide opportunities for you to stimulate students to question their beliefs and attitudes, to encourage inquiry and to experience new ways of looking at the world. Students bring their own knowledge and experiences to university teaching and learning contexts. Lectures can help students make links between new material and their previous knowledge and experiences. They can provide a framework for students to discover and make sense of new information and concepts.

Lectures can help students to be inducted into a culture of learning in an academic discipline or a field of study they have chosen. Lectures provide the only way for many students to experience an expert in a field of study who can, with skilful planning, model academic argument and problem solving, simultaneously. You may have current information from different sources not readily available to students, including your most recent research, which you can bring together efficiently.

Lectures provide opportunities for you to explain and analyse concepts, problems and issues, clarify misunderstandings, and augment material that students may have in a textbook, handout or website.

Research shows that students appear to like well structured, well presented and relevant lectures and that they are likely to learn more.

Take a student-focused approach to your lecture

Clearly specify what you expect students to be able to understand and to do at the end of the lecture. Consider your students' level of expertise and sophistication and any issues of diversity with which you might be faced. Adopt deliberate strategies to organise your material and to improve communication with students.

Preparation for a lecture

Consider the importance and context of the topic of your lecture. How does it link to the previous lecture or the following lecture, to tutorials and laboratory classes, and to the subject aims and objectives?
Determine whether this lecture is the introduction to the topic and perhaps an opportunity for motivation, or a chance to consolidate ideas or concepts.
Decide what it is that you want students to learn in the lecture. Make a plan of how you are going to achieve these learning objectives. Lectures are not about 'covering material'.
Keep the number of main points simple: from three to five.
Decide whether you will write out the whole lecture, or work from an outline. Don't read your lecture notes during the lectures.
Decide how you will illustrate your main points using visual materials.
Plan for diverse learners (see A Guide to Developing an Inclusive Curriculum).
Practice presenting the lecture in front of a mirror or with friends if you are giving it for the first time.

Organising the content of a lecture

There are many ways in which you can organise the content of your lectures. Keep in mind the activities you will plan to engage your students and maintain their interest during the lecture. Plan these within your outline. The structure of your lecture will include three parts:

Introduction - "Tell 'em what you are going to tell 'em"
Main Body of lecture - "Tell 'em"
Summary and conclusion - "Tell 'em what you told 'em"

Engaging the audience in a lecture

Your aim in your introduction is to arouse interest, gain attention, establish rapport, and communicate your intention.

Show an outline of the lecture and the objectives and key points you will be making (relate these to the subject learning objectives). Keep coming back to these key points during the lecture.
Link information presented in your lecture to students' prior knowledge. This can include previous course work or the common experiences you have been developing in your subject.
Exhibit enthusiasm for the topic
Integrate visuals, multi-media or other appropriate material relevant to the topic. One benefit in using some kind of visual display at the beginning is that it directs attention to the visual aid rather than to you. This allows you to overcome initial nerves.
Give a startling statistic, ask an open-ended question, or provide a hypothetical. These might relate to the experiences of the students, and should be linked to the main points in your lecture.
Narrate a story or personal experience.
Pose a problem in which the students will be using the information you want them to learn. See what solutions they suggest before you start. They will need to feel safe that they can make 'wrong' suggestions.

Delivering the lecture

Vary your approaches to lecturing. Focus on what students will actually do in the class. Plan for diversity.

Consider your body language. Monitor your speaking rate, force and pitch and try to make regular eye contact with audience.

Consider where you stand to present the lecture and vary your positions where possible (this might be limited by microphone use or if the lecture is being videotaped). Change positions, but do not pace up and down.

Consider your clarity in explanation. Use verbal signals eg signposts, frames, foci, links to help students focus on the main points and to keep track of where they are. An important point to keep in mind in terms of verbal signals is the cultural diversity of your students. Verbal signals are culturally learned and you might need to highlight your use of them in one or two early lectures.

Activity / interactivity to improve learning

Provide a space every 15 - 20 minutes or so for students to reflect on what you have presented in order to help them construct their understandings of your main points. These are just a few ideas:

Have students reflect individually or in pairs, telling each other what they thought was the most important point in the last 15 minutes of lecturing.
Have students write down a question or comment sparked by the past 15 minutes. You can have a neighbour respond, and/or collect them at the end of the session for feedback to you.
Set a short quiz at the beginning, middle or end of the session. This could include multiple choice questions based on the information you have just presented.
Provide opportunities for students to ask any questions, which you answer.
Give students an Applications Card. Students list as many possible applications as they can for the ideas, techniques and strategies discussed up to a point in the session. (Source: Angelo & Cross 1993)
Get students to work in together in pairs or groups to discuss a specific topic or problem within a set time limit, eg 3 minutes. This could relate back to the information in the handbook, or to practical experiences.

Obtain Feedback From Your Students

This will help to find out if your lectures are working. Take time to observe the students' non-verbal communication in the lectures such as eye contact, note-taking, response to your questions or humour, seating patterns. Do they seem to be 'with' you? What will you do if they are not? Other methods of gaining feedback include having students:

Write down what they think are the 5 main points or the 5 pivotal issues addressed in this lecture (Orrell and Gannaway, 2001)
Write down the main idea of this lecture in one or two sentences.
Use a 'one minute' reflection at the end of the session to ask, What stood out as most important in today's lecture? What are you confused about?
Conduct a more formal evaluation of your lectures.

Each of these feedback methods will provide you with opportunities to clarify students' misconceptions.

Elicit and Answer Questions

In large lecture classes students tend not to answer questions, however question and answer sections are an effective way for students to interact and to retain attention. Use open, rather than closed questions.

Give students time to prepare answers, preferably in small groups. Groups rather than individuals, are more likely to speak up.

When a student asks a question, move away from the questioner, and acknowledge the student at this greater distance. This forces the student to speak up and to address the question to the class as well as the lecturer. Repeat a student's question. This invites the class as a whole to consider the question and come up with their own answer.

Avoid moving in the direction of nuisance questioners. Moving towards these students has been found to be a prompt.

Make it a routine procedure that students write down questions that they want you to answer. Collect them, group them and answer them in the next lecture.

Pace of the Lecture

The pace at which a lecture is communicated is vital to its success. With increasingly 'crowded' curricula in many disciplines lecturers worry about how to 'cover all the material in their subjects. Review the content and look for key principles or issues. Other parts of the curriculum could be used as examples of these key principles / issues. Focus on some of the key issues or principles in lectures and use handouts and references (or tutorials) to cover the broader material. Don't pack in too much data, and limit your use of long quotations. It's better to leave something out than to rush through the material.

Concluding the lecture

Some ways to conclude lectures include:

restatement or review of main points
conclusions or implications
ask if there are any outstanding questions
give questions to be answered before next tutorial or lecture
suggest further reading on topic
request reading for next session
give a short quiz

Support materials to improve learning in lectures

In a large class, well designed support materials are essential. Ensure they are available to all. Support materials can include:

visual materials
- chalkboards / whiteboards
- overhead projectors
- powerpoint slides
- videos / slides / films
handouts
note-taking

Key questions to ask about visual materials

what is the purpose of the visual material?
can students see / read the material?
what do you want students to be doing while the material is displayed?

Some Purposes for Using Visual Materials

introducing a lecture, or parts of it
providing visual examples of the material
presenting complex material
stimulating interest, thought, or discussion of a topic
providing variety - and thus contributing to attention and interest, and summarising or integrating ideas presented

PowerPoint

Advantages

allows students to interact with the subject material
enables the use of pictures through such tools as Clip Art, by which you can store and access illustrations
can be used to produce slides, handouts, speakers notes and outlines

Problems and Issues

lecturers reading the screen text
lecturers who have too much on the screen and then speak to it (What should the students be doing - listening, reading or taking notes?)
the pace and sequence of the presentation can be fixed by the prepared slide presentation
technical problems
Students not attending lectures because the have access to the PowerPoint presentations

Guide for using visual material (powerpoint, slides, overhead transparencies)

use at least a 24-point font
try to limit the material to 8 lines per overhead
summarise the main points
use easily read fonts. Simple fonts like Sans Serif and Ariel. Don?t use italic fonts
dark letters on light (or transparent) backgrounds for overheads. Light letters (yellow or white) on a dark background (eg, dark blue) for slides or LCD projectors
keep it simple. Less is more
check the order in which you need to present the slides or OHTs and store the material in that order
allow at least one minute per slide or image Based on L Gould (2000)

Handouts / manuals / webnotes

An important consideration in preparing each of these for your lecture is to clarify its purpose and its relationship to the lecture. How do you want students to be using them in your lecture? They can be used to:

give factual information before the lecture to ensure students have a basic background before the topic is elaborated or developed in the lecture
release time for discussion or for thought about the application, the validity or the relationship of the material to other topics;
relieve the pressure of the crowded curriculum
provide a guide to the lecture. This can be particularly useful if the lecture is complex
to save note-taking
revision and accuracy

Note-taking in lectures

Think about when and why students will be taking notes in your lectures. Let them know. The benefit of note-taking includes:

to aid memory during the lecture
to aid revision
to see the developing structure of a topic
to relate and reorganise during further study
to select what is important
to know what has to be learned
to maintain attention Bligh, D. (2000)

References

Angelo, T. A. & Cross, K. P. (1993) Classroom Assessment Techniques, San Francisco: Josey-Bass Publishers
Biggs, J (1999) Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Buckingham, Society for Research into Higher education, and Open University Press
Bligh, D. (2000) What?s the Use of Lectures? San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Edwards, H., Smith, B. and Webb, G. (2001) Lecturing: Case Studies, Experience and Practice, London: Kogan Page.
Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, S., and Habeshaw, T. (1992) 53 Interesting Things To Do In Your Lectures, (4th edition) Bristol: Technical and Educational Services.
Mosteller, F. 1989 The "Muddiest Point in the Lecture" as a Feedback Device, On Teaching and Learning: The Journal of the Harvard-Danforth Centre, 3, pp 10-21
Ramsden, P. (1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education, London: Routledge.
Gould, L. Guidelines for Preparing Effective Presentations, Based on a Roundtable Discussion led by Professors Mary S. Schriber and Susan Deskis and a letter to the editor from Betsy Bowden in the Spring 2000 (32:1) edition of the MLA Newsletter.