improving lectures
How Can I Create More Effective Mini-Lectures?
Active learning brings many benefits to the college classroom, but no matter how much emphasis your curriculum places on engaging students, sometimes you still have to disseminate information. This program explains how to deliver effective mini-lectures that resonate with your students.
Improving Teaching One Class at a Time
Can we reform teaching and learning throughout higher education one class at a time? I used to think so, but the pace of change has made me less optimistic. I just finished preparing an article for The Teaching Professor newsletter that reports the results of a survey of 744 full- and part-time faculty teaching at eight two-year technical colleges across Georgia. The researchers presented the respondents with a list of 18 instructional strategies and asked them to identify how often they used each one in their last 10 class sessions. Over 90% of the respondents said they lectured for four or more class sessions with more than 50% of those saying they lectured during all 10 class sessions.
Teacher-Centered, Learner-Centered or All of the Above
In November I had the great privilege of interviewing Parker Palmer. If you don’t know his book, The Courage to Teach, it’s one not to miss. If you haven’t read it in a while, it merits a reread. After reading it again, I found new ideas I missed the first time, old ones I have yet to understand completely and others I hadn’t thought about for far too long.
Recent Seminars
Lecture Alternatives: Four Strategies to Engage Students
Lectures are still a valuable pedagogical tool, but sometimes lectures are more effective when you use them a little less often and intersperse them with some other tools and techniques. Even slightly shifting the balance of classes can lead to better outcomes for students and, ultimately, better evaluations for you.
audio Online Seminar • Recorded on Thursday, December 13th, 2012
What Did We Learn about PowerPoint and Student Learning?
The recent post on PowerPoint use generated a healthy response. That’s encouraging, but blog exchanges can seem like conversations without conclusions. There is no summary, no distillation, and no set of next questions. And when there are many comments, I worry that those who respond first don’t return to read what follows and those who check in later don’t have time to read all the comments. So for my benefit and yours (hopefully), here’s how I would summarize our exchange on using PowerPoint.
School Daze: Eye-Tracking Study Reveals What Earns Students’ Attention in Classroom
A new study contradicts the widely accepted belief that classroom attention peaks during the first 15 minutes of class and then generally tapers off. Instead, David Rosengrant, an associate professor of physics education at Kennesaw State University, discovered that classroom attention is not as linear as previously thought and is actually impacted by various factors throughout the duration of the lecture.
Does PowerPoint Help or Hinder Learning?
I’ve had some nagging concerns about PowerPoint for some time now. I should be upfront and admit to not using it; when I taught or currently in my presentations. Perhaps that clouds my objectivity. But my worries resurfaced after reading an article in the current issue of Teaching Sociology. I’ll use this post to raise some questions and concerns about the role of PowerPoint both in the classroom and in student learning experiences.
Do Your Students Understand the Material, or Just Memorize and Forget?
Have you ever heard of Eric Mazur? If you teach physics and are into that discipline’s pedagogical literature, in all likelihood you have. But Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, is someone all of us should know. The reference at the end of the post contains a succinct and compelling introduction to his work.
The Challenge of Teaching Content When Test Stakes Are High
As educators, we share the challenge of how to teach an overwhelming amount of content in a short period of time to a sometimes motivated but often bored and listless student population. I do believe that most students enter higher education with a true desire to master their subject area. Some are even interested in learning for the sake of learning. But lectures overloaded with PowerPoint slides quickly change the motivation to extrinsic. This is especially true in fields where high-stakes testing determines future career options.
Lecture Capture Can Change Classroom Dynamics for the Better
When I heard a teacher tell me that they were creating recorded lectures for courses as homework assignments and spending classroom time on discussions and more active learning, I knew right then the value of the lecture capture tools.
