Though many instructors may rely too heavily on lecturing as a technique, lectures have a valid place in intro courses. In Teaching Philosophy, Brook Sadler outlines some of the specific advantages of lectures in intro philosophy classes.

 

Advantages of Lectures:

• Communicating interest in the subject. A good lecture can make something more exciting than even the best written book or most lively video.

• Conveying information not easily available in any other source.

• Structuring information to suit the purposes of the course and the instructor.

 

Disadvantages of Lectures:

• Students tend to lose interest after a fairly short period of time.

• Lectures can play into the misguided belief (especially for a subject like philosophy) that learning is about getting "facts" from the instructor and being able to repeat it. 

• Lectures are not very effective in teaching critical thinking or higher order skills.

 

Techniques for Effective Lectures:

• Try to reset students' attention every 15-20 minutes.  After fifteen or twenty minutes, it is useful to "reset" attention by interjecting some activity.  This could be as simple as asking students to write a single sentence explaining the main point being discussed, or to explain something that they haven't understood (O'Connor).  Barbara Millis provides 8 techniques for breaking up a lecture, including asking students NOT to take notes for a short period, and then work in groups to reconstruct what they heard.

​​

• Intersperse group activities. For example, a twenty minute lecture, followed by a ten minute group discussion, followed by another twenty minute lecture can be much more effective than 50 minutes of straight lecture (Bonwell and Eison 13). The group work could be a simple exercise such as "think-pair-share" (see below) or a more complicated group activity.

​​

• Make lectures interactive. Find a way to solicit feedback from students during the lecture, for example, by asking for a show of hands "How many feel that . . . ?"  You can also write questions ahead of time and project them as a way to break up the lecture and foster some critical thinking about the content. 

​​

• Use what the ed school types call "Classroom Assessment Techniques" (CATS) to break up lectures.  The idea here is to use short, ungraded, anonymous student quizzes.  These serve two purposes: providing you feedback and breaking up the lecture. Some faculty members use the "One Minute Paper" as a way to get feedback.  In large lectures, some instructors use clickers.

​​

• Use examples that relate material to the everyday experience of students. Good, well structured examples are sometimes hard to come up with on the spot, so this is something you should actually write up as part of your class preparation. Try not to rely entirely on "insider" examples. Students from different cultures and backgrounds may not respond to examples from sports, or areas of popular culture not familiar to them.

​​

• Help students organize their notes. The instructor can help students retain the material by providing a structure and emphasizing important points and connections. Some instructors provide handouts that serve as a kind of pre-made structure for students to use to take notes on the course.

​​

• Use visual aids. PowerPoint has its detractors (some people think it makes students passive and likely to fall asleep in a darkened rooms), but some studies show that it can be effective, especially if it can include graphics as well as bullet points (Clark). However, too often I've seen PowerPoint become a crutch, especially for new instructors, whereby the instructor is tethered to the front of the room and students are in the back watching movies on their laptops. As a lecturer, I find it important to move around the room, so I think the use of presentation software like PowerPoint needs to be judicious.   

​​​

• Introduce course topics as problems that need solutions. It is most effective to start with something that hooks students into the topic. E.g., how can our belief in determinism and free will both be true? How can an all good god and evil both exist? Given that there is moral disagreement in society, how can we know that a given course of action is right? Etc. 

​​

• Use humor. Some education researchers have studied classroom humor.  Students respond best to humor about the course, gentle humor about students themselves, and good spirited self-depreciating humor about the professor.  They don't like sarcastic or negative humor (according to an editorial in The Teaching Professor, 20.6 (2006) 1) [This editorial is apparently lost in the bowels of time; a google search did not turn it up and even The Teaching Professor archive only goes back to 2011].

​​

• Learn to speak effectively.  As Aristotle would say, the things we must learn to do, we learning by doing. So, by simply giving lectures you should become somewhat better at it over time. The best way to set yourself up for success from the start is to prepare detailed lecture materials, as this will ensure that you really know the material and have something to say about it. Have a friend sit on on your lectures, or record them and watch them back if you are worried about elements of your presentation style. Even try practicing your lectures before delivering them.

​

• A the above bullet point suggests, at the end of the day a good lecture depends on preparation. Write out your lecture notes; write out questions you intend to ask; diagram arguments and raise objections to those arguments all within your notes. If you spend time on your notes, you will not need to re-read the articles you teach, because the creation of the notes will, more than anything else you do, teach you the material in a deep way. Skimming your notes for five to ten minutes will be all you need to do before each class after that. 

​​

Sources:

 

Bonwell, Charles C. and James A. Eison, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom  ASHE-Eric Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School for Education and Human Development, 1991.

 

Cashin, William E., "Effective Lecturing," IDEA Paper No. 46, 2014.

 

Clark, Jennifer, "PowerPoint and Pedagogy." College Teaching. 56.1 (2008): 39-45.

 

Goulden, Nancy, "Improving Instructor's Speaking Skills," IDEA Paper No. 24, 1991, 24 January 2008 

 

O'Connor, Terry (The College of New Jersey), The Complete Lecture, presentation at the Lilly East Conference: Learning by Design, University of Delaware, April 2008.

 

Sadler, Brook J.,  "How Important Is Student Participation in Teaching Philosophy?"  Teaching Philosophy. 27.3 (2004): 266.  Sadler argues that the value of lecturing (compared to class discussion) has been underestimated.

 

Detailed Material:  

 

Think-Pair-Share:  Stop the lecture, ask students to talk for a few minutes to one or two of the students sitting next to them, and generate either a question or a reaction to the material just being discussed. Don't ask for volunteers initially, but call on specific individuals to ask "What did your group come up with?" It's a good idea to have students write something down, or better still have a specific prompt for them to discuss at the end of the lecture with their partner. E.g., How does Descartes characterize the self and do you agree with this characterization?

 

One Minute Paper: Leave time in the end (or middle) of the lecture and ask students to take four or five minutes to write a short paper, saying what is the main point that they learned and what questions they still have. Some students report that knowing that they will be asked to do a one minute paper helps them organize their thoughts during the lecture, and the responses give the teacher a sense of what has been learned. See here for examples.

 

Author: John Immerwahr
Update: September 27, 2015 (E Tarver); July 2019; 11/11/2025--David Sackris