Terry O'Connor at the College of New Jersey suggests structuring a lecture to flow through five different "social learning activities."   He also suggests a basic lecture pattern.  

 

O'Connor's Lecture Pattern:

 

• Entrance -- set tone and establish trust, established by greeting students, exchanging information.

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• Settle down -- shifting individuals from focus on individual and personal to group tasks, established by setting agenda for the day, dramatically grabbing attention, distributing a handout, posing a problem or thought for the day's class.

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• Work -- working through the main substance of the material.  O'Connor suggests a basic pattern, that might be repeated several times through the main body of the lecture:

  • Present concept

  • Provide example

  • Get student example (an active participation that resets attention)

  • Closure.

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• Resetting attention -- all of the studies suggest that students' attention fades after a surprisingly short amount of lecture time.  The best practice is to change up the pace shifting from lecturing to some other activity.  One faculty member says this:  "I have just set my computer to ring an alarm in ten minutes. When the alarm goes off I'll ask you to write down the most important thing you heard in that ten minutes."

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• Clear Up -- a time for individuals to reflect on what has happened, could include some sort of summary exercise like the one minute paper, or a summary by the instructor, or a connection to previous work. Some faculty members ask students to write down the "muddiest point" (least clear thing from the lecture).

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• Exit -- clarify activities for the future, return material, make announcements, remind students of next assignment (they have it on the syllabus but it is better to remind them in person), explain what will be learned in next assignment.

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In general, it is a good idea to establish some kind of rhythym to your classes so students know what to expect. In my classes, students know to expect that about half of a 75 minute session will be devoted to lecture and about half will be devoted to group work of some kind: Answering interpretative questions about a text, diagramming arguments, comparing arguments, workshopping thesis statements, etc. 

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Although it's not talked about much at the college level, it is a good idea to develop lesson plans, or a rough outline of what you expect to occur in each class session. O'Connor is essentially providing a lesson plan template. There are many lesson plan templates out there. Some of these, in my opinion, are overly complicated.

 

The thing to think about is this: What do I want students to learn in this class session and how are they going to learn it? So if the goal of a class session is to demonstrate the difference between inductive and deductive arguments, what are you going to do to help students learn this distinction and make sure that they understand it? A lesson plan for this class session might be as simple as:

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• Lecture for 15-20 minutes, explaining induction. 

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• Put students in groups of three and have them write their own inductive arguments and then have a couple students put their arguments on the board. Discuss the student examples (10 minutes)

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• Lecture for 20 minutes, explaining deduction.

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• Put students in groups of three and have them write their own deductive arguments and then have a couple students put their arguments on the board. Discuss the student examples (10 minutes).

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• Give students a handout that contains 10 passages. Have students work in groups to determine if the arguments are examples of  inductive or deductive reasoning (10 minutes).

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• Discuss the passages and provide answers (10 minutes)

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This lesson plan would fill up an entire 75 minute class session. 

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The work is the preparation before hand. For example, finding or writing ten sample arguments takes some advance planning (although this sort of thing is much easier now with the advent of LLMs; LLMs are very good for generating problem sets). 

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Here is a helpful resource on lesson planning, without an overly complicated template, for the UCSB Office for Teaching and Learning. 

 

Monitoring your performance:

 

When it comes to lectures, we have an excellent way of checking how effective we are: how do students do on your assessments? I am not saying that the instructor is totally responsible for student performance--I am not saying that at all. But if you base your exams on your lecture notes and your class activities, then you should expect the students who attend class and actively participate to do reasonably well; and if they do not, you need to try something different. For example, I would expect students who participated in the class session on induction and deduction described above to do reasonably well on an assessment that called for them to distinguish between inductive and deductive arguments. Although this is often a pejorative phrase, you should teach to the test, because at the college level, you create the test! "Teaching to test" is only a pejorative when the instructor has no control over what the final assessment is going to be. 

 

Source:

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.

 

 

Author: John Immerwahr
Update: July 5, 2012