Making Lectures Less Painful

http://www.duq.edu/cte/teaching/lecture-strategies.cfm

As every good teacher know, students have a very short attention span (specifically 10-15 minutes according to Sally Brown and Phil Race). However, we cannot seem to cut out lecturing entirely from our lessons because it is one of the most time efficient ways to get information across and students need to hear the correct information the first time so they are not practicing false information. Brown and Race are suggesting that teachers break their lectures into mini-lectures. These would include short 10 to 15 minute lectures that would keep students engaged by using anecdotes and stories to help students make a connection to the material and remember it better. In between these mini-lectures, you could do group work, think-pair-share, discussion, or worksheets. Students have less to digest at a time and will most likely be able to retain the information better. The authors call these mini blocks that will save your voice and engage student learning.

Palloff and Pratt also encourage the use of mini lectures in the online classroom setting. They of course take on a different look because they are in fact online classes. They discourage the practice of posting lectures and notes because the students look at it as “just one more thing to read”. Instead, they suggest “that lectures begin and end with questions; the beginning questions help frame the lecture as a way of trying to make sense of a topic, and the ending questions encourage the students to continue the inquiry. They also give out the idea that teachers could assign the mini lectures for the students to do and then form the discussion questions themselves. I think this makes students take responsibility for the content and their learning. When they get directly involved, it becomes more meaningful and is remembered better.