Rethinking Your Classroom Lectures? Don’t Forget This One Key Step

When you’re on, your classroom lectures are fantastic! 

At the sound of the bell, you magically transform from a humdrum schoolminder to a dynamic entertainer.  You own the room.  Like skilled dance partners, you and your presentation work in perfect unison.  You elicit laughs and higher-order thinking from one and all.  

But some days your lectures aren’t so good.

If you’re a typical teacher, you probably know how it feels to look out into a sea of clock-watching, passive students during classroom lectures.  (We’ve all been there.)  Those days can kill the momentum in a unit and are, frankly, why lecture gets a bad name.

Despite this negative view of the technique, lectures can be an efficient and effective method of conveying information to students.  Most teachers lecture at least some of the time.

One often overlooked key to effective classroom lectures?  Students have the opportunity, either during or immediately following the lecture, to use the content in some meaningful way.

Teacher as “giver of knowledge”

As you probably know, lectures began with history’s first teacher, Confucious around 518 BC.  Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all used lectures as a method of instruction.  

Let’s jump ahead to the rise of public education in American society in the mid-1800s. Teachers were viewed (respected!) as a person with knowledge.  The teacher’s job was to share that knowledge with the students through direct instruction.  Viola, we have classroom lectures. 

 “The answer was right in their lecture notes!”

If you haven’t said this yet about your students, you will.  It can be frustrating when the time and effort you expend during a lecture results in missed questions on a test.  Were the students even paying attention?

Maybe. 

The problem — and solution! — might lie in your lecture technique.

As we discuss in our article about revamping classroom routines, lecturing can be engaging — remember, you’re a dynamic entertainer!  

But there is one common problem we see when teachers lecture:

• While you’re lecturing, the students are passive.  Sure, they’re taking notes, but that doesn’t require much thinking.  Throughout much of the lecture, you’re the only person actively engaged with the material.  

• Later, you’ll give a quiz or test on the lecture. You might become frustrated (I’ve experienced this before) when students miss test questions associated with your lecture material.  “It’s right in their notes!”  

• The solution?  During or immediately following your lecture, allow students to process, analyze, or synthesize the material.  They need to do something with the information you just gave them.  Without that, the content loses meaning. 

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Here’s the “Key Step” to Include in Classroom Lectures

Create opportunities throughout your lecture (or at the end) for students to work with the material and make meaning of it.  Asking students to copy notes to then move on to something else teaches your students that the notes are not important.  The best lectures intentionally build opportunities for students to think about the content as it is being delivered and interact with it. 

8 Ideas You Can Use Tomorrow

Here are a few simple ways to increase your student’s interaction with your lecture material.  They are broken into individual and partner categories, however, all can be easily adapted based on your needs.

Individual Learning Activities: 

Headline–Have students review the lecture notes and write a headline or title that summarizes the key aspect or concept of the notes.  

Why It Works:  This requires that students reflect on the notes, think about the key aspects of it, and write a summary in their own words.  Bonus: it’s quick!

Visual–Have students create a symbol or visual that best captures the essence of that idea.

Why It Works:  This, again, forces students to reflect on the key idea of the lecture and then link it to something visual.  For those who dislike drawing, it may be helpful to explain that the purpose is not the drawing itself.  What they’re doing is creating connections in their memory between the information and the visuals they chose.

Quiz Questions–Have students review the material.  They then write one question that they might see on a quiz that they can answer and one that they could not.

Why It Works:  This exercise requires students to think about their understanding of the material.  If you ask if there are questions, most likely you will not get any hands raised.  Asking students to create quiz questions re-frames the task. They will think about what is most important from the material.  They will reflect on what they do and do not understand. 

Challenge It–Have students write a question or statement challenging an aspect of the material.  

Why It Works:  This works best in the humanities subjects.  Students engage with the material by considering their reactions to it and how it fits with their perspectives and beliefs.

Color Code–Students take three colored pencils (red, yellow, green) and review their notes.  For concepts they feel they know well, they draw a green line in the margin.  For concepts they do not understand, they draw a red line.  Yellow for concepts they feel they partially know.

Why It Works:  Using different colored pencils helps students think about which parts of the lecture they struggle to understand.  Rather than the teacher getting general questions or statements like “I don’t understand anything we just did,” this exercise gives them time to review and think about what it is that they do and do not understand.  This works best a day or two later.  Take a few minutes at the start of that class to have students do this exercise and then review the concepts that they have marked as red or yellow.   

Partner Learning Activities:

Explain It–Partner One starts by naming the big idea of the lecture, Partner Two explains that big idea, Partner One gives reasons or details that build on the big idea, and Partner Two closes with a question about the material.

Why It Works:  Having students work together in an alternating fashion helps students piece the material together, bounce ideas off one another, and build on each other’s knowledge.  This works best with more complex topics where they may need more help to build their understanding of the material.

Looking Backward, Looking Forward–Partners review the lecture and then make one or two connections to previous material explaining how these concepts fit with that knowledge.  Students then “look forward.”  This can be by making connections to the real world, connections to another class, predictions about what could happen next, or an explanation of how this could or does impact something else.

Why It Works:  This exercise expands their thinking and ensures that they build connections and build upon the material you have provided.  It works best when there will not be many questions about the content of the lecture. 

3, 2, 1–Conclusions, Connections, Questions–Students work together to come up with three conclusions they can draw from the notes, two connections they can make to the content, and one question that they have.

Why It Works:  This exercise helps students synthesize the material by concluding, creating connections beyond the material, and thinking about what questions remain.

Amanda Melsby has been a professional educator for 20 years.  She taught English before working as an assistant principal and later as a high school principal.  Amanda holds an Ed.D. in Educational Practice and Leadership and is currently a dean of teaching and learning.