Making Lectures Learning Experiences: Ideas to Keep Lectures Interactive
Toni Enloe
Nov 29, 2011
How can we transform lectures from passive to active learning experiences?
"Engagement is the glue that holds their attention long enough to get to understanding."
- Carol Ann Tomlinson
Classrooms focused on learning, rather than coverage, keep students actively engaged in the learning. The reality is that not everyone will love your subject as much as you. So, how do you keep students engaged long enough to gain understanding? If you examine the definitions of the two words that make up the phrase "actively engaged." Encarta defines "active" as "moving about, working, or doing something, and not resting or sleeping" and the word "engaged" is defined as "occupy, engross, take part in." When you consider active engagement in your classroom, design activities and tasks that provide opportunities for students to work directly with the new content, the acquisition of new knowledge, beyond "sit and get."
How can you make lectures more engaging for your students?
How do you avoid becoming the "talking head" (remember the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons?)? When you are excited about the content, that excitement can become infectious.
In turn, when students are excited they become more motivated.
Ask yourself these questions:
1. During lecture, how often do I interact with all of my students? Am I the "Sage on the stage" presenting fact after fact with only one-way communication?
2. How do I communicate my enthusiasm to my students?
3. How often do I break from my lectures to allow students to work with the new content?
4. How do my students organize the new material?
5. How do I engage students with questions that lead to new insights?
6. Do I share the responsibility for learning with my students?
Activities that are not actively engaging include:
* Pencil and paper worksheets that keep students busy,
* Round robin reading and then answering section check- up questions,
* Copying lists of vocabulary words and defining them, and
* Writing or copying pages and pages of notes during a lecture.
While these activities keep students busy, they are all passive. They lack "glue" to help students get to "understanding." Instead, design activities and tasks that will get students moving and thinking about the new content.
How can you involve and engage students?
1. Get them moving. If you insist that students stay seated during the entire class period, you are not providing an the most favorable environment for learning to take place. Students are going to move anyway whether it's getting up to sharpen a pencil or visit the trash can. They will find a reason to move, so use it to your advantage. The act of having students move activates the cerebellum, that part of the brain that controls the "coordination of motor movements as well as basic facets of memory and learning." EX: after briefly discussing the circulatory system, have students walk through the steps or after talking about mitosis, have students move through the steps of mitosis. Rick Wormeli describes how he got students to remember that "a lot" is two words. He labeled one side of the wall with the word "a" and the other wall with the word "lot." Students moved from one side to the other touching the wall. There are many websites that describe how to get students moving. Students will remember the movements associated with the content.
2. Make your content memorable. Using stories or anecdotes to emphasize key points during lecture will make it more conversational and can generate more interest and enthusiasm among students.
3. Give students permission to talk. The use of collaborative pairs gives students permission to talk. Create opportunities for students to talk about your content.
4. Utilize Assessment Prompts. Design Assessment Prompts that will give you formative feedback and allow students to interact with the new content.
* One-Minute Write - In this activity, ask students to respond to one of the following questions, "What was the most important point made in our discussion so far?" OR "What's one question that you still have?"
* Draw it: Ask students to quickly draw and label a flow chart and provide the next step in the sequence
* Find the error in my thinking - Present a drawing or statement and ask, "What are the errors in my thinking?"
* PMI - Ask students to make a quick list of pluses, minuses and intriguing points about a topic.
5. Utilize Graphic Organizers- remember that graphic organizers help students "make sense" of new content. When well designed, graphic organizers help students make connections unlike traditional approaches to note taking.
These are only a few suggestions for how to make lectures true active learning experiences for your students. For additional ideas on how to break up a lecture, check out the "Teaching Strategies" section in the LEARNING-FOCUSED Strategies book, Connecting Exemplary Practices in Acquisition Lessons. Learn about strategies like the Pause Procedure, Study Group/Feedback and Open-Ended/Response.
