Academics have a tendency to lecture, as this is the way we learned. Some things, indeed, need lectures. But most of us can improve our lectures. Here are some simple ways that lectures can be improved.

Vary the voice style.

Move around the room.
There’s Joe’s picture plane. (He says that teachers tend to stay within a “window” away from the students, like there is a piece of glass between them/us and the students.) I go to a part of the room where I am not normally. Or I take two parts and move back and forth between the two spaces.

Keep lectures short.
Of course, I think 15 minutes is short and the students think 30 seconds is short.

Start the lecture with a question that the lecture is aimed at helping the students to answer.
For example, You will have to write an essay later giving examples for this question: “How has the world changed from Old English to Middle English times?” One of the examples you could discuss is women’s roles. Then I give my Old English lecture on women’s roles.

Include an activity or assignment immediately after the lecture that involves the lecture.
Example, “List five things that differ from Old English literature/culture that you could note and write down as we read through Medieval literature.”

Prepare a handout.
This could be the main points OR
it could be the important concepts left blank with some of the notes filled in.

Tell stories.
People like jokes; they like stories. Give them something they can relate to and let them hang the information on that.

In the discussion of content of literature of the era, I talk about informing the uneducated. One part of this was the stained glass windows, which told stories from the Bible and acted as a picture Bible.
I bring a picture of a stained glass window that matches what the literature is about.

Relate the new information to previous information.
Remember that OE/ME essay you have to write? This is the second half of the information you need to use.

Create an activity or an assignment that applies the new information to the overall themes of the course.
We are looking at the intellectual and moral aspects of literature. What part of the contextualization would help us identify these?
–Answer: Content. This is the section that lists things like “strong belief in faith” and “plays that instruct illiterate masses in morals and religion.”

Definitions I like:

[W]e need to think because the world we live in, however well we learn to cope with it, is constantly forcing us to choose. When experience surprises or disturbs us, we have to “make up our minds,” and, as the phrase suggests, when we do that, not only are we deciding what to do with the world about us; we are deciding what we are or want to be. –Monroe C. Beardsley, Practical Logic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1950), x-xi.

[There are] two distinctly different kinds of thinking, creative thinking and critical thinking. Creative thinking may be defined as the formulation of possible solutions to a problem or explanations of a phenomenon, and critical thinking as the testing and evaluation of these solutions or explanations. –W. Edgar Moore, Creative and Critical Thinking (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967) 2, 3.

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. –Michael Scriven and Richard Paul, “Defining Critical Thinking: A Statement for the National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking Instruction.” http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/definingCT.shtml (16 May 2005).

I guess I personally describe critical thinking as the ability to listen to something or read it and analyze it for pathos (emotion) and logos (logic) appeals.

A simple series of questions starts this process:
What is the work trying to say?
What is it actually saying?
What is the work trying to make you feel?
Did it succeed?
What was it using to try and make you feel?
How is the text (or the picture) making an argument?
Is it a legitimate argument?
If it is not, what kind of fallacy is it making?

With both my students and my sons I model this. I remember very clearly pointing out a billboard to my sons and explaining that the billboard was trying to convince them that
1. alcohol was okay in the middle of the day
2. spaghetti needed a cold beer with it
3. a good time guaranteed with spaghetti and beer

Then I asked them what in the billboard made me think that.

I do the same thing by looking at a reading, telling the students a couple of different ways to look at something, and then asking them to tell me how someone reading the work could arrive at one conclusion over the other.

I talk about presumptions when I am doing this and I explain that a question can have two very opposite answers, assuming different ways of looking at something. I give as an example the “dueling exam professors.”

Example:

I wrote my thesis on Hemingway’s novels. I didn’t read many of his short stories. (Mistake that.) Several profs came to my defense. Two of them taught Hemingway and had opposing approaches to his works.

So the first one gave me a scenario, “Assuming X and Y (which were both true), what is the answer to Q?” I answered the question.

Then the second gave me a competing scenario, “Assuming A and B (which were also true), what is the answer to Q?” Again, I answered the question.

My answers were totally opposite. I don’t think both of them could be true in reality. But given the parameters of the question with those things as most important, the answers came out differently.

I tell my students that if I knew which of the presuppositions were in fact incorrect or which were minor instead of essential, I would have only had to give a single answer. But I didn’t.

It’s an example of critical thinking in action. Not a fun example when you are the person being used as the saber in the duel, but a reasonable one.

This was from the adjunct certification course as well.

Upon review I have discovered that my most positive evaluative memories are NOT tests. I am an excellent test taker. And yet my positive memories are not of tests.

I wonder if this is because test-taking is so easy for me or I am so good at it that I don’t even “notice” tests? I will have to think about this.

My strongest positive memories of grades in college were in conjunction with research papers. I loved the diving into a subject, studying it, and immersing myself in it. Sometimes it would take me a while to get started, but I really did well once I chose a topic. I took a Latin American history course and wrote my paper on “The Course and Effect of Smallpox on the Conquest of the Spanish New World.” It was an incredibly interesting paper, combining all my loves (history, English, and biology). And the teacher liked it too. I had some technical difficulties with it but still got an A on the paper. I don’t remember the course (though I could show you the classroom), but that paper has melded into my mind and heart.

I have used the information I learned in that paper several times over the course of my life and still remember quite a bit about it though I wrote the paper 29 years ago.

Another paper I wrote and remember and felt was a positive evaluation experience was a paper I started at the last minute because I did not have a clue what I wanted to write on. I stayed awake for 72 hours researching, watching movies (war propaganda films from WWII), taking notes, reading, and writing. I use the paper as an example of “I’ve been there and put it off” and sometimes it works when I am talking to my students about not putting off papers. I don’t remember a lot about that course, though I do recall the professor and still own one of his books, but I remember a lot about that paper. And I have several books on allied propaganda from WWII because the paper created an interest that continued for years.

My final positive evaluation experience is one I refer to in all my classes. I tell my students that I am not terribly attached to the idea that they have to get As. I tell them, instead, that I want them to do their best. If their best is a C, then they should be proud of that C. And I tell them of the C I earned in college that I am very proud of.

A genetics course required a year of college biology, a year of college chemistry, and the consent of the instructor to take. I hadn’t had any college science at this point (though I concurrently took Medical Microbiology) and my math skills were at Algebra I level. However, I was always brave and bold scholastically and I approached the professor and he agreed to allow me in the class.

This was a summer course, seven weeks, and seventy people started in the course. I worked a lot, went for math tutoring both from the lab and from the teacher- trying to make sure I got the concepts. He talked about Walker Percy (whose works I read because of this class) and the genetic illness that people who became known as werewolves have (a discussion I have used in my high school biology teaching and my freshman comp classes). I worked hard in that course, probably as hard as I have ever worked in a class. Of the seventy people who took the course, nine passed. And I got a C.

I am very proud of that C. (I have one or two others I am not so proud of, but that one, that one I worked for.)

Maybe I am not as big on tests as other people because those aren’t strong positive factors in my memory. But I do know that positive evaluation experiences don’t require that I received an A in the course. Both the college history courses have final grades of B. (I was indulging in a social life back then.) So for me, it isn’t all about the grade.