Lectures

1. List two advantages and two disadvantages of lecturing as a teaching modality.

2. Describe two methods to more effectively engage learners during a lecture.

3. Describe two practices to guide the use of slide software (PowerPoint) during a lecture.

Reflect on a particularly good lecture you heard in the past year. Now think about the opposite. List two differences between those two lectures. Write down three items that made the “good” lecture a positive experience for you, and two items from the other that made it less than positive.

List two or three benefits and two or three disadvantages of a large group lecture format (for example, >25 or more participants).

Think about the most recent lecture you gave. Write down one or two specific aspects you want to focus on to improve for next time. You can consider any aspect from the broad categories of preparing content, organizing content, or delivering content.

Assuming there is a compelling reason the learners need to know the material, is a lecture necessarily the best teaching format?

One way of answering this last question might be to consider the advantages and disadvantages of lecturing. Here are some examples:

Video 1: Dr. McCarthy speaks on why the lecture still has value and how to make them interactive.

Video 2: Dr. McCarthy speaks about some guiding objectives for lecture delivery and methods on how to involve the audience.

If you are considering giving a lecture, or have been asked to give a lecture, start with the following questions:

Who is my audience?

Why does the audience need to learn this material?

If the audience consists of students or trainees (as in most cases), how does your lecture link to the broader medical and biomedical education curriculum objectives? What about the specific course objectives?

The development of a great lecture is best summarized by four steps. The remaining four tabs in this MODULE section will cover each of the steps. ^{2, 4, 5}

• Preparation (Tab 5)
• Content development and organization (Tab 6)
• Delivering the lecture (Tab 7)
• Assessment of your lecture (Tab 8)

Let’s assume you’ve decided to give a lecture on a topic in your area of expertise. At this point it’s always best to cycle back to the questions we raised in Tab 3 of this module.

Who is my audience?

For example, are they content experts or novices? The audience may represent mixed learner levels, often the case in medical and biomedical education, such as in a Grand Rounds talk. While there is no one size fits all answer to how your lecture should vary based on audience, you must be thoughtful about this in the subsequent preparation steps.

How does my lecture fit into a larger curriculum?

An awareness of what your learners already know (or can perform) is critical in order to build on their prior experiences. This addresses one of the core principles of adult learning theory. ⁷ A little time spent investigating the prior curriculum goes a long way in being able to link your content to past topics, challenge your audience and most importantly, not confuse them or bore them with old material. Redundancy in a curriculum can be good, but it should be planned.

Next it’s time to think about the creation of goals and objectives. One helpful way to proceed is to think about program goals and learner objectives. Goals should speak to what you hope the lecture will achieve using action words. For example, “the goal of this lecture is to provide a framework for understanding hematologic malignancies.” Objectives on the other hand are best worded in terms of the learner.

The work of Kern et. al., reminds us that objectives are best worded in the following way, “Who will do how much of what by when?” ^{8, 8} Here the “WHO” and the “WHEN” are self-evident – with WHO being members of your audience and WHEN being the end of your lecture. Answering the other questions requires a dedicated focus to what you actually want your learners to know, or do – i.e., the core material. It also allows you to develop your content such that learners get to the right endpoint. Two examples of objectives would be the following.

1) By the end of this lecture, students will be able to list at least four causes of acute renal failure.

2) By the end of this lecture, students will be able to interpret basic laboratory testing in patients with renal failure.

Notice the difference in objective 1 and 2, with objective 1 being about the recall of facts versus the higher order skill (interpretation) in objective 2. The action word in an objective (the verb) should be carefully chosen based on what you want your learners to know or perform. Writing objectives is a critical step. There are many resources to help you use the correct language in written objectives. Among them are, http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/Objectives/ActionVerbsforObjectives.pdf.

The content of a lecture is the “method” which allows your learners to achieve the objectives. Therefore, your creation of content should always have the objectives as a focus.³ In this way, you reduce the risk of two very common errors in lecturing:

1) providing too much content and/or

2) providing content that is significantly above your learner level.

In general, keeping your lecture succinct and highly relevant will enhance information transfer and overcome some of the limitations of the lecture format in general. Keep in mind that lectures are often scheduled for a certain period of time (1 hour) for ease of scheduling faculty time. Don’t feel compelled to fill the hour with meaningless or overly sophisticated material. If it will take you 35 minutes to achieve the objectives of your talk, use 35 minutes and leave time for discussion.

When it comes to organizing the content, find connections between topics in order to enhance the flow of your talk. In general, it’s best to go from the macro level (introduction), to micro level (important details), back to macro level (take home messages). One strategy to help with organizing content is to create an outline or map of your talk on paper or computer. Experiment with moving sections of the talk around, to see if there are more logical transitions between topics in one format vs. another. Consider what your organizing principle is and stay true to that. (for example: scientific themes, time sequence, a problem solving sequence).

Lastly, once you have an outline of your talk, allocate time to each of the sections. Be realistic. This step often brings up the difficult decisions about which content should be removed (i.e., not core content).

Video: Listen as Dr. McCarthy reflects on where the knowledge is housed in the lecture hall. His answer may be different than you think.

It goes without saying that, if you want to give a great lecture, you can’t just expect to walk in and speak to a large group. You have to carefully plan the delivery methods. This planning step has critical importance because it’s your opportunity to be creative. Even with a large audience of over 100 people, the method in which you deliver information is the key factor to keeping the audience engaged and in many cases involved.

Selecting Delivery Methods

PowerPoint:

Everybody who has attended a lecture in the last several years has viewed a PowerPoint presentation. While easy and efficient, PowerPoint by itself may not be the best way to keep an audience engaged. If you use any slide creation software, select the appropriate number of slides (generally fewer than you think), minimize the number of bullets per slide, avoid confusing graphics and distractions, and use images rather than text to represent ideas as much as possible. Some helpful tips to improve a PowerPoint presentation can be found here https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/presentation-rules.html.

Video 1: When using slides, visuals are critical. Too often lectures barrage the audience with text overloaded slides, or show a table which is bloated and completely illegible. Consider what your real objectives are for a lecture. The audience doesn’t really need to know how much you know. This is about your objectives. What is the most important information to convey?

Methods of involving your audience:

Remember, you are not merely reciting information, you are teaching a large group session. In order to make your teaching more effective, you have to involve the learners. There are a number of techniques that accomplish audience involvement, depending on what you’re teaching.⁹

1. Pausing and encouraging questions during the talk.
2. Incorporating small group discussion in your lecture. Ask learners to turn to their neighbors and work in groups of 2-4 to discuss a prompt or question that you provide Allow 3-5 minutes for the students to “buzz” and then ask for one or two groups to report out. Summarize key findings from the discussion.
3. Provide a few questions in advance of the lecture (paper, digitally, or via a course management system). During your lecture, pause, giving students a prompt to work on one or more questions in a defined time period. Again, you can have a few people report back, with you summarizing the key learning point from the question.
4. If you are teaching skills – for example communication skills – have students pair up and role-play the skills that they are trying to build.
5. Electronic audience response systems (ARS), commonly referred to as “clickers”: There are many agreed upon best practices for using clickers, such as keeping the questions simply worded and dispersing questions throughout the lecture.¹⁰ This serves to not only keep the audience engaged but also allows the lecturer to determine if the audience is achieving the learning objectives. ARS technology will be covered in another section of our IMPROVE YOUR TEACHING website. For now, some helpful online resources for audience response systems include:

http://www.cer.jhu.edu/ii/InnovInstruct-Tech_Clickers.pdf

http://www.turningtechnologies.com/pdf/he/Best-Practices.pdf

Delivering the Talk

By the time you get to this stage, you should be very familiar the content of your presentation. Make sure that you have rehearsed your lecture several times. You want to pay attention to the audience, not simply read a script or notes. Practice is essential. Arrive at the lecture hall early in order to minimize any nervousness and to envision how your talk will go. Your goal during the lecture is to continuously monitor the audience’s attention and level of learning. You can do this using some of the techniques mentioned above, which not only engage the audience but also helps you gauge their level of understanding.

Video 2: We are not all stage actors, but giving a good lecture means being engaging. And sometimes we might just need a little feedback on our stage presence.

Video 3: It’s the very rare speaker who doesn’t have to practice. Expert lecturers know the importance of practice.

Video 4: Here’s a summary of points from Dr. McCarthy.

Your work isn’t done with the lecture. To continually improve, it is critically important to reflect on your work. Use whatever is available to assess the lecture’s effectiveness: gather and read student evaluations. The literature supports that these correlate positively with student learning if a well-developed instrument is used. If there is a learner assessment of your material such as an examination or quiz, look at the results to see where the students performed below your expectation. Consider modifying your lecture accordingly.

Finally, consider using a coach. You can be your own coach, either by reflecting on the lecture immediately after completion, using a scoring sheet or watching parts of the lecture if it was videotaped. In other sections of this website we will be describing a more formal peer coaching process, whereby a peer can attend your lecture and/or review a videotape We have included the IEE form to evaluate lectures. ^{11, 12}

Here is a comprehensive review of ways to refresh your lecture. Scan this article and keep it for your reference. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12098394

If you are interested in watching the entire video of Dr. McCarthy giving a “lecture on lectures” please click here. http://oacapps.med.jhmi.edu/som-IEE/How-to-Engage-a-Lecture-Audience/NewStandardPlayer.html?plugin=HTML5

Have a question or a comment about giving an effective lecture? Do you have a topic that you would like to see added to this module? Please contribute to our discussion forum by clicking here.
Teaching Methods Forum

Review a specific lecture you have recently given or plan to give. List 3-4 objectives of the lecture using action words. If you had already listed objectives, make sure they are clear, formatted in appropriate action words (See Tab 5) and fit the overall objectives of the full course in which the lecture is given. Make a slide of the four key take-home points of the lecture.

Review a lecture you have given recently or plan to give soon. Consider the amount of content in the lecture. Try to reduce this content by 10% while still getting across the essential teaching points to achieve your stated learning objectives.

Analyze one of your lectures regarding timing and audience involvement. Embed an active learning activity (see THE MODULE -> Delivering the lecture -> Tab 7) every 8 to 10 minutes of the planned lecture.

For your next lecture, use the IEE lecture review form to either (a) evaluate the lecture immediately after completing it, (b) watch and evaluate a video of your lecture and/or (c) have a colleague watch and evaluate your lecture (live or video) and plan time for a 15 minute formative feedback session. The following is a rubric for assessing a lecture developed by the Institute for Excellence in Education (IEE). This form was developed based on the medical literature. ^{11, 12}

Peer (self) Review of Lectures Form

1. When making use of engaging teaching methods, lectures can be an efficient and effective way to convey essential information to many learners at once.

2. When preparing a lecture, always reflect on who your audience will be, and how your lecture fits into a larger learning program (curriculum).  Then create carefully constructed learner objectives for the lecture.

3. In almost all cases, “less is more” with lectures.  Focus only on critical content, keep slides clean with minimal text, use images/ pictures/graphics instead of text whenever possible.

4. The use of  adjuncts such as audience response system (ARS) can be effective in lectures.  But low-tech approaches such as “think, pair-share”, using effective questioning, and allowing for small group “buzzing” can be equally engaging.  Make sure to include at least one of these techniques in your lectures.