Lectures

While for the most part in this wiki, I would like to explore new strategies that I have not considered yet in order to learn new strategies, I would like to start with a tired and true strategy: Lecturing.

Lecturing is defined by Wikipedia as "an oral presentation intended to present information or teach people about a particular subject, for example by a university or collage teacher".

Most people view lectures as a very ineffective and boring teaching strategy. However, if carried out well and mixed with other strategies, I think lecturing could be effective for student learning in some cases.

In a class discussion today in EPS 350, the students all agreed that a lecture has to be engaging to the students in order for it to be effective, i.e. for students to learn from it. In order for students to learn, repetition and making connections is necessary. So, a lecture can be effective in aiding student learning as long as the lecturer makes sure to repeat and help the students make connections between the ideas/concepts in the lecture.

So, instead of organizing a lecture lesson as so:

Set: big picture Development: detail 1 detail 2 detail 3 etc.... Closure: big picture,

the development should be more in the form of: detail 1 explanation example repeat detail 1 explanation example repeat detail 1 student gives explanation or example detail 2 explanation example detail 1 connection to detail 2 explanation example detail 3 explanation example detail 1 detail 2 connection explanation example etc....

In order to do this, the teacher must understand all the details in order to know what order to put them in from a learning perspective.

A good website that explains lectures and gives advice on how to lecture is: [|Delivering a Lecture].

An evaluation process that is consistent with lectures is constructed response assessments such as short answer, since these assessments typically show an understanding of relationships among facts. As noted previously, lectures are most effective when the lecturer presents a new fact, goes back to previous facts and make connections between these facts.

Another interesting article on lectures, [|Improving Student Learning in Lectures], describes an assessment tool, the One-Minute Paper in which students answer 2 questions: What is the most important thing you learned in class today? What question remains uppermost in your mind? This is essentially an exit slip, though the author suggests that it may be used in the middle of a lecture to break it up.

For business education content, I would use a lecture for Accounting when introducing T-accounts and the accounting equation. I think using lots of examples and linking new ideas back to previous ones would create a good flow for a lecture in this situation.