How to Deliver an Engaging Lecture: A Lecture on Lectures

I am the Engagement King. Self-proclaimed, yes, but a king none-the-less. I love engagement. I am good at it, I can talk about it, describe it, identify it. I can do all the things. Students from my church to my school love my lessons because I make them a part of the lesson, not just bystanders. But here's the thing. Sometimes, however, explicit instruction is the best way to teach a lesson, skill or concept. Even while I love engagement strategies, and I apply them all the time, I know there are sometimes when you just have to say the thing! Tell students what they need to know. History is a great example. Yes, there are plenty of ways you can use engagement in history (inquiry-based learning being the first to come to mind), it is also appropriate to outright teach historical events. Lectures take place when we tell students.

Unfortunately, lectures are usually boring. Don't believe me? Go watch a 40 minute TED talk. More importantly, go watch a TED talk on a subject you are unfamiliar with and that doesn't mean a lot to you. Ok, are you back? Let me tell you what happened. You zoned out, you heard words that didn't make sense to you. You checked your phone, you checked your email. You may have even paid an online bill or two. Guess what... students are doing the same thing while you are lecturing. Teaching them about state government and how it differs from the federal government and the definition of unicameral legislations doesn't appeal to most students. (It gets me VERY excited, however, but I digress.) So what do we do at those times we need to lecture but we don't want to loose kids? We embed engaging strategies into our lectures.

This is the point where you say, "What you talkin' bout Willis?" Yes, my teacher friend, there are ways we can make lectures engaging for students. I will outline a few of them here:

1. Check for Understanding

When you stop and ask questions, you avoid making the mistake that Charlie Brown's teacher always made- going on endlessly without ever knowing if students were picking up what she was putting down. In other words, how do you know if students are understanding, if you don't take a poll, ask questions, get them to summarize the material, etc.? You don't. Teaching is unimportant if learning is not taking place. We may know we are teaching, but how do we know students are learning unless we check for learning? There are quick checks for understanding like, "hold up your fingers 1-3 to show me your level of understanding of what I just said," for example. Or, "Write a summary of less than 9 words of what we just discussed." Really, there are endless ways to check for comprehension of a lecture, but the key is to do it before relaying too much information.

2. Encourage Discussion

Students, well people for that matter, like to talk. Lectures don't naturally allow for the audience, in this case your students, to talk. What better way to keep engagement high then to allow them to tell a partner what they found interesting, tell a group what they disagree with the most strongly, or get out of their seat and tell someone across the room what they will remember the most from the lesson. The bottom line is discussing with other peers will force students to process the information well enough to share it. It also allows teacher the ability to address misconceptions if she hears them through out the discussion. The key here is to plan at which points in the lecture will you allow students to talk to each other. Certain parts of the lesson encourage more discussion and opinion than others, so think this through carefully. When done properly, discussions will be a huge game-changer in activating learning.

3. Use Captivating Visuals

More words and less visuals. Period. You've heard the old saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words." I couldn't agree more. Showing maps of battlefields, charts of unemployed Americans during the Great Depression, graphs of how many bacteria can multiply within 60 minutes, pictures of famed authors or politicians, etc. are all ways to tell without telling. These visuals allow students to interpret in a way other than your words. It allows students who have difficulty reading words on your slide to see the information in a way that may make more sense to them. And to put it bluntly, it's just more fun!

4. Incorporate Metacognitive Activities

This is my favorite idea to spruce up your lecture but it's probably the most underutilized. Throughout your lecture you should have students predict what happened next or what will happen if something else happened. You can have students create a different solution to declaring war or conducting an experiment a certain way. I also have segments of my lectures that have students match certain events with certain outcomes in the slide; it's almost like a Blookit, but instead of stopping a video to participate, you stop your lesson for participation ever so often.

5. Keep it Short

I love the concept of a mini-lecture. They are burst of lecturing mixed with activities. In my professional opinion, strong teachers don't lecture for an entire class period. Strong teachers teach or lecture part of the time and give students' time to discover, form opinions, research, discuss, draw conclusions, formulate predictions, and more. This is called active learning. Gone are the bad 'ol days when we thought learning meant students were seated and quietly listening to the sage on the stage. Because to be honest, there is little evidence to suggest learning was happening but a lot of evidence that compliances was taking place. We aren't compliance directors, ya'll, we are teachers, so keep it short and allow students to learn in various ways, and you become a guide by their side.

It's not easy designing these types of lectures, but I can help. I have created so many mini-lectures that incorporate active learning strategies.

Check them out here:

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