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Enhance learning with stimulating lectures

Cheerful black student having fun on a class in the classroom.

Must the lecture be lifeless? See how you can use different teaching methods to enhance learning.

Over my career, I’ve given hundreds and hundreds of lectures (and listened to hundreds more). Which is odd, in a way, because there’s a vocal movement telling academics to ditch the lecture in favour of alternative instructional approaches that variously get called active learning, inquiry-based learning, flipped classrooms, and more. There’s a good reason for that: those approaches, used well, are in many cases more effective than the traditional lecture. But “many” isn’t “all”, and for a whole constellation of reasons lectures are going to remain part of the higher-education landscape. For one thing, academics are no less conservative than anyone else, and our deep familiarity with receiving and giving instruction by lecture almost guarantees the persistence of the form. For another, mixes of lectures and active learning may be more effective than active learning alone, especially when lectures are used to equip students with knowledge they’ll need to take full advantage of instruction in different formats.

If the lecture is here to stay, we ought to care about doing it well. We all know it’s possible to do it poorly; we’ve all sat through an hour of lifeless, droning monotone, or perhaps worse, an hour-long frantic attempt to pack in as much information as (in)humanly possible. (Sadly, early in my career I delivered some of these.) Here’s a big claim, but an important one: we can do better. When we choose to involve lectures in our teaching, we can make them engaging and bring our students along with us.

But how?

There’s no single magic trick, but I think there’s a unifying theme that’s worth making explicit. It lies in a subtle piece of misleading terminology. The most widely-used term for approaches that aren’t lectures is “active learning” – and that implies that lectures are “passive learning”. The way to make lectures better is to do anything – anything at all – that helps students not just sit quietly, passively listening and nothing more. There’s a huge range of possibilities here to enhance learning, but as a few examples:

“Chunk” material into short mini-lectures

While the literature is contentious, a common claim is that it’s normal for students to sustain deep, actively thinking focus on a lecture for just 10-15 minutes at a time. An hour-long deluge of information just isn’t going to be effective; but five 10-minute chunks – or 10 five-minute ones – with breaks in between can be. It’s common for beginning lecturers to worry about the time “lost” to the breaks – the temptation to pack in more and more information is just so hard to resist. But information offered to disengaged students achieves frustration (for both involved parties), not learning.

Use breaks

As long as you’re taking breaks, use them to prod students to think actively – about the material and about their learning – with pre-tests, pop quizzes, clicker polls, and the like. These needn’t take long; even a single question polled using clickers can get students thinking about what they know and how the lecture they’re in might change that. Peer-to-peer interludes like think-pair-share exercises work similarly, and have the added bonus of recruiting students’ social interactions in service of learning. Just be cautious: without some care and some help for students, techniques like think-pair-share may be inequitable, disadvantaging students who are introverted, neurodivergent, or speak English as an additional language.

Get students involved

Recruit students to present material, assigning a student, or a group of students, to prepare and give a short presentation on a topic you’d otherwise have lectured on yourself. This can keep the material fresh, bring perspectives you wouldn’t have thought of, and help both presenters and listeners learn more deeply.

Refresh attention

Use physical breaks to refresh student attention. Even in the postsecondary classroom, stand-up or even exercise breaks can increase student focus on the material between the breaks.

Use visuals

Engage students with more than one modality. A picture may not always be worth a thousand words, but asking students to swallow a thousand words without a picture is a bad idea. So don’t just talk, or expect students to read text from slides. Show a beautiful photo that illustrates a point, or even just accompanies one (making it clear, of course, which of those you intend). Show short videos or play sound clips. The internet abounds with material to enhance learning, and most modern classrooms are equipped to share it easily.

Make it relateable

Relate material to students’ own experiences. I explain negative feedback by asking students to think about their home thermostats, and “interference” vs. “exploitative” competition with reference to cafeterias and buffet lunches. Sure, those examples might be trivial; but pinning a concept to something a student already knows or thinks about can make it accessible in a way the underlying theory will never be. It also asks them to think, not just listen.

Add humour if you can

Don’t be afraid to be funny, even if it occasionally makes you look a bit foolish. The best lectures you’ve ever seen were probably about 5% standup comedy. Not necessarily great standup (we can’t all deliver that) but with a bit of practice you can work in a pun or an unexpected line that can interrupt a student’s slide into inattention. (There are lecture topics for which humour is inappropriate, to be sure, and jokes that are inappropriate no matter what the topic. This isn’t an invitation to be crass or tasteless.)

Project your own enthusiasm

This might be the most important tip of all, actually, even if it seems like a tiny thing. If students don’t think you care, you can hardly blame them for not caring either. But enthusiasm is contagious: just think about how David Attenborough makes you care about an ant! So when you show that interesting fact or describe that novel interpretation, step back and throw in a “Holy crap!” or a “Wow!”. You’ll be nudging your students to think and to react the same way.

No lecturer will take like a duck to water to every one of these approaches, so think of this as a toolbox, not a single big prescription. But over my career, I’ve experimented with most of the options I’ve listed, and it’s only improved what I can offer my students. The lecture isn’t dead (and won’t be any time soon); but with a little thought and creativity, it needn’t be lifeless.

How to gain lecturer experience

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Dr. Stephen Heard

Dr. Stephen Heard is an evolutionary ecologist and Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He is the author of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing and of Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider. He blogs about academia, science and many other things at Scientist Sees Squirrel, or you can find him on Twitter as @StephenBHeard.

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