CHAPTER 2
Integrating Lectures and Active Learning
Conceptions of what constitutes effective college teaching and learning have changed dramatically in recent decades, raising expectations for teachers and students alike. No longer are college professors expected simply to stand in front of a classroom and transmit knowledge to an attentive but passive audience. Instead, today's teachers are challenged to engage diverse learners while developing students' abilities to apply thinking and problem-solving skills to rapidly changing social and workforce conditions. No longer are students expected primarily to progress through a sequence of steps designed to help them master a relatively stable storehouse of knowledge. Instead, today's students must grapple with complex content, demonstrate their learning through increasingly proficient performance, and learn how to learn in more powerful and efficient ways.
This book, at its most fundamental level, is about good teaching that is intentionally directed toward improved student learning. It's about finding effective, efficient, and engaging ways to share knowledge with students. It's about creating an instructional approach that fosters interaction among students and instructors. It's about promoting students' sense of agency and helping them develop the skills and abilities they need to be successful in and beyond a single course. It's about communicating high expectations and providing students with feedback on their learning so that they can improve. In short, it's about how best to teach students in ways that enable them to manage the demands of today's changed workforce and cultural context and engage in deep learning. In particular, this book is about integrating lectures and active learning to create a “pedagogy of engagement” (Edgerton, 2001).
We have titled our particular approach interactive lecturing, which we see as a unified integration of engaging lecture presentations and active learning methods. We draw from research findings as we provide faculty members with a practical guide on how to combine the two seamlessly to create a dynamic learning environment that encourages students to invest the energy and attention required to achieve deep learning. In this chapter, we answer the following questions:
- What is interactive lecturing?
- How can faculty members make lecture presentations more engaging?
- What active learning methods best support student learning during lectures?
The Interactive Lecturing Model
Interactive lecturing is the process of combining engaging presentations with carefully selected active learning methods to achieve intended learning goals. Our model builds on that of those who have suggested active and interactive lectures previously (e.g., Bonwell, 1996; Middendorf & Kalish, 1996; Silver & Perini, 2010; Sokoloff & Thornton, 1997; Steinert & Snell, 1999) but offers a more explicit approach of combining engaging presentation and active learning techniques. During an interactive lecture, the class session is structured into segments of presentation combined with and punctuated by segments of student activity. Interactive lecturing provides students with a way to prepare for the lecture, a format for active listening during the lecture, an opportunity to use information from the lecture, and an assessment of their learning after the lecture.
Interactive lecturing is useful for college teachers who not only want or need to lecture but also aim to do more than transmit information. Rather than simply presenting material, college teachers embed a well-planned, engaging presentation within a sequence of activities that help students understand, process, apply, and retain new information. Instead of simply “covering content,” college teachers create conditions that empower students to take greater responsibility for their own learning. Thus college teachers can use interactive lectures to help students engage in a structured and supportive learning environment that ensures students are active participants before, during, and after the lecture. We illustrate our model in Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1 Interactive Lecturing
Interactive lecturing is the product rather than the sum of the two components because engaging presentation and active learning strategies must be included and because combined they can work together to produce a powerful pedagogy greater than the sum of its parts. Blended together, engaging presentations and active learning methods result in something more than the simple conjoining of two instructional approaches. Indeed, our choice of the term interactive is rooted in the idea that engaging presentation and active learning methods can interact synergistically. We now turn our attention to the two core components of the model: engaging presentations and active learning methods. We begin each section with a description of the concept and an overview of the research that underpins our model, and we conclude by demonstrating the relationship of research to the Tips and Techniques in Parts 2 and 3 of this book.
Engaging Presentations
In an interactive lecture, an engaging presentation is a core component within a carefully constructed process designed to ensure learners are active participants in their learning. During the presentation, the instructor has the opportunity to share with students a wealth of knowledge honed over time. The knowledge may be explicit, when it is possible to articulate and codify, or it may be tacit, when it is more difficult to verbalize. Effective college teachers share their knowledge with students in ways that make students want to learn it. When teachers share knowledge in a “telling” situation (rather than having students access information on their own), good professors strive for engaging presentations. What counts as engaging probably varies by the learner. However, we propose that in general, engaging presentations are those in which the teacher does the following:
- Sparks the learner's curiosity and then maintains interest throughout
- Speaks with enthusiasm and expertise
- Respects the learners
- Uses language economically and effectively
- Shares content in a manner that is well-organized and unfolds logically
- Proceeds at a comfortable pace
- Concludes in a way that leaves listeners satisfied that their time listening was well spent.
Educational research provides useful information about what constitutes an effective lecture presentation, such that the presentation itself is related to improvements in student learning.
Research on Presentation Elements
We provide an overview of engaging presentation elements organized into five key themes: focus, format, supports, climate, and communication.
Focus
Educational research documents that creating and sharing clear learning goals is critical to effective teaching. Hattie (2011, p. 130), for example, conducted a synthesis of more than eight hundred meta-analyses about teaching and learning and concluded that “having clear intentions and success criteria (goals)” is one of the key strategies that “works best” in improving student achievement in college and university courses. Thus, we can help students learn more from lectures if we provide them with a clear indication of the intended purposes and desired learning achievements of the presentation.
Most educators will agree that lecturers can improve student comprehension of presentation material when they deliver content in ways that communicate a well-defined and logical structure, and educational research supports this idea. In a longitudinal study on the relationship between instruction and student learning outcomes, Wang, Pascarella, Nelson-Laird, and Ribera (2015) found that clear, organized instruction was related to improvements in deep learning and higher-order thinking skills. Loes and Pascarella (2015, p. 1) in turn found that “student perceptions of instructor clarity and organization are associated with student gains in . . . critical thinking, academic motivation, persistence . . . [and] likelihood of obtaining a college degree.” Furthermore, researchers have found that teachers who are clear and organized contribute to students' development of cognitive and critical thinking skills and also influence college student departure decisions in a positive way (Braxton, Bray, & Berger, 2000; Pascarella, Edison, Nora, Hagedorn, & Terenzini, 1996; Pundak, Herscovitz, Shacham, & Wiser-Biton, 2009).
Format
Most of us intuitively understand that while students are listening to a lecture, they need to be able to concentrate on what the lecturer is saying. Sustained attention is necessary to make connections to the material and to store it in short-term memory. Yet several studies show that student attention wanes during long lectures (see, for example, Farley, Risko, & Kingstone, 2013; Risko, Anderson, Sarwal, Engelhardt, & Kingstone, 2012; Scerbo, Warm, Dember, & Grasha, 1992). These findings suggest that shorter lecture segments will be more effective than longer lectures.
Research also indicates that the specific type of lecture format a lecturer chooses may also influence student learning. Researchers have found, for example, that lecture demonstrations are beneficial to student learning (Balch, 2012). Others have found that storytelling and performance lectures also improve student learning (Glonek & King, 2014; Short & Martin, 2011). What these studies suggest is that lectures that are based on a format that students can easily recognize and process and that have some narrative sense and connectivity can improve learning.
Furthermore, students are oftentimes novices in our disciplines; thus, they may have a more difficult time distinguishing what is core content in a lecture and what is an interesting aside. Identifying and communicating the most essential points to students is critical. Researchers have found that too many details can distract student attention from the most important points in a lecture. Harp and Maslich (2005), for example, found that when students listened to a lecture with numerous details, their recall and problem-solving were hindered compared to when they listened to a lecture with fewer details.
Supports
Slides or no slides? That is the question that many lecturers today face, and several researchers have investigated the relationship between student learning in lecture classes and presentation slides. The general consensus seems to be that students like having slide-supported presentations and may feel that teachers who use them are more effective (Nouri & Shahid, 2008). Even though students may prefer slides, however, most studies indicate that these audiovisual supports do not necessarily correlate with improved learning. Indeed, some studies show that slide presentations with irrelevant information lead to poorer performance (Bartsch & Cobern, 2003) supporting Harp and Maslich's (2005) conclusion that distracting details can be a barrier to learning. Although the research on audiovisual supports is mixed, it generally suggests that presentation support materials that are clear and relevant contribute positively to lectures. Research also indicates that other kinds of supports, such as lecture outlines or note-taking frameworks that students fill in during the lecture, have improved student performance (Austin, Lee, & Carr, 2004; Raver & Maydosz, 2010).
Climate
Ambrose, Bridges, DiPietro, Lovett, and Norman (2010, p. 170) define classroom climate as “the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical environments” in which students learn. Weimer (2010), drawing on Fraser, Treagust, and Dennis (1996), defines classroom climate as “a series of psycho-social relationships that exist between faculty and students collectively and individually.” Climate is determined by a constellation of factors that include faculty member–student interaction, the tone instructors set, instances of stereotyping or tokenism, course demographics, student-student interaction, and the range of perspectives represented in the course content and materials. Researchers have shown that a negative or uncivil climate can hinder student success (Hirschy & Braxton, 2004). They have also shown that instructors can make efforts to establish a positive climate that contributes to student success (Dallimore, Hertenstein, & Platt, 2006).
Communication
The very term professor suggests that communication is an important part of the job. Derived from Latin, the term means “one who professes.” And although the term over time has come to mean a specific academic rank, communication is still key. Educational researchers have documented that instructor communication and interaction with students is critical to effective teaching. Umbach and Wawrzynski (2004, p. 21) found that faculty members' “behaviors and attitudes affect students profoundly, which suggests that faculty members play the single most important role in student learning” and retention. In particular, instructor caring, enthusiasm, and expressiveness are related to improvements in student learning (Dachner & Saxton, 2014; Hodgson, 1984; Murray, 1997).
Synthesis of the Research on Presentation Elements
The key themes in the literature suggest that instructors who plan to present should focus on several elements to improve student learning: focus, format, supports, climate, and communication. Shifting from a transmission lecture that tends to foster passivity to an interactive lecture designed to promote active learning requires teachers to adopt a different orientation as they attend to each of these elements, as illustrated in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Contrasting Transmission and Interactive Lecturing Presentations
| Transmission Lecturing | Interactive Lecturing | |
| Focus |
|
|
| Format |
|
|
| Supports |
|
|
| Climate |
|
|
| Communication |
|
|
Informed by the research and inspired by Eison (2010) and Light and Cox (2001).
Tips for Engaging Presentations
An engaging presentation is an essential element of the interactive lecture. Although we acknowledge that some teachers seem to be naturally skilled at delivering lecture content in ways that listeners find inherently interesting, many of us who teach in the trenches of academe are not. Furthermore, some of the content we must deliver simply lacks luster. Yet regardless of our personal style or the challenges of the content, we can ensure we make the most of what we have. The Tips in Part 2 of this book provide concise, research-based pointers for designing and implementing lecture presentations that promote meaningful learning and in ways that student learners will find engaging. They are organized on the key themes in the research and represent the factors faculty members should intentionally incorporate when crafting interactive lectures. We illustrate these interlinking elements in Figure 2.2.
Figure 2.2 Engaging Presentation Elements
The Tips are organized into five categories that loosely correspond to the five engaging presentation elements. The Tips correlate as well as to the stages of preparing for and then delivering lecture content. We illustrate the connections between presentation elements and Tips in Table 2.2.
Table 2.2 Engaging Presentation Elements Correlated to the Engaging Lecture Tips
| Presentation Element and Tip Category | These tips help you to . . . | Corresponding Chapters |
| Focus | Think through the overarching purpose and broad qualities that will shape your lecture |
|
| Format | Organize and express more precisely lecture content and structure |
|
| Supports | Produce the materials that will support presenting and understanding lecture content |
|
| Climate | Ensure you are prepared and primed for the lecture, addressing the social side of the lecture, and carrying out the session efficiently and effectively |
|
| Communication | Use professional practices for speaking, taking questions, and wrapping up the session |
|
The engaging presentation Tips are intended to offer guidance on various aspects of lecturing so that you can maximize the effectiveness of your content presentation.
Active Learning
The second key component of interactive lecturing is active learning methods. In previous books in the College Teaching Techniques series, we argued for a broader understanding of active learning than simply associating the term with an instructional approach, activity, or technique. We suggested that active learning involves making students dynamic participants in their own learning in ways that require them to integrate new information into their personal knowledge and experience. As with what constitutes an engaging presentation, we suspect that what promotes active learning is different for different learners, but in general we suggest that active learning happens when students are engaged in their learning in one or more of the following ways:
- Use sophisticated learning strategies
- Seek deep, conceptual understanding rather than surface knowledge
- Use learning strategies with personal relevance
- Use self-regulatory and metacognitive strategies
- Seek to share personal perspectives
- Seek to understand others' perspectives
- Demonstrate curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm
- Offer input or suggestions
- Seek out additional and further opportunities for learning
Although active learning can happen anywhere and at any time, we propose that when identifying an approach to promote active learning in a college course, teachers should consider two components: a learning task and a goal for the level of activity involved. By learning task, we mean an academic activity that an instructor has intentionally designed for students to do to help them meet important learning outcomes. By level of activity, we mean students' mental investment and the strategies they use to reflect on and monitor the processes and the results of their learning.
Level of activity is a discrete component because one type of learning task does not necessarily demand more mental investment than another; rather, each type of learning task can require more or less mental activity depending on the individual learner as well as the content and design of the specific task. For example, although some educators argue that students who are listening to a lecture are necessarily learning more passively than those who are solving problems, consider the following problem: X + 3 = 5. Most college students can solve this problem without too much mental activity. However, college students who are listening carefully to a lecture can have high levels of mental activity, including focused attention, curiosity, empathy, critical thinking, and so forth. Thus students can have low to high levels of mental activity in any given learning task and any given learning task can require and result in more or less active learning from students. We offer our own conception of the active learning continuum for several key learning tasks in Table 2.3.
Table 2.3 The Active Learning Continuum for Several Key Learning Tasks
Levels of Mental Activity  |
|||
| Learning Task | 1 Low |
2 Moderate |
3 High |
| Listening | Listens for facts and information | Maintains concerted attention while trying to understand the message and to formulate questions about the message | Expresses interest and enthusiasm; attempts to critique and evaluate the message; monitors own attention |
| Problem-solving | Solves the problem | Recognizes the underlying structure of the problem | Considers the processes for solving the problem and self-monitors efforts and progress |
| Reading | Seeks facts and information | Seeks structural understanding | Seeks meaning and monitors own reading engagement; investigates related readings and resources |
| Discussing | Relays facts | Conveys ideas and concepts and encourages others | Shares personal perspectives and seeks to understand others; argues and evaluates concepts; self-monitors participation |
| Writing | Describes and defines | Explains and applies; expresses personal perspectives; seeks out references | Critiques, evaluates, and creates; seeks to express personal perspectives and connect with others' ideas; monitors progress and assesses quality |
Viewed in this way, the term active learning can and should include the learning that can occur when students are listening to a lecture. If students learn something during a lecture, they have been mentally active, whether through listening, remembering, questioning, contemplating, or other. They likely have also been involved in activities such as note-taking, and in our model of interactive lectures, they will participate in additional activities, such as discussing and problem-solving. The challenge, then, is to help students move from level 1 (low) to level 3 (high) on the continuum in terms of their mental activity, whatever the learning task happens to be.
The techniques in Part 3 of this book are designed to help teachers assist students in moving to higher levels of mental activity. The techniques are grounded in research that documents that there are specific activities that support student learning in lectures, thereby addressing some of the constraints of learning associated with transmission lectures.
Research on Active Learning
We summarize the research on active learning that supports lectures along four themes: for preparation, for attention, for application, and during closure.
Preparation
Many of us who lecture think of our presentation as the starting point of a learning unit, but research suggests that engaging students prior to presenting new information can improve student learning from the lecture. Such prior preparation makes a lecture more effective because it provides students with the necessary background to understand new information, rather than relying on students' entering understandings of concepts, which may differ widely. Thus interactive lecturing involves starting the learning unit prior to the lecture session. Assigning pre-instructional tasks and stimulating student interest in the topic are two ways to prepare students for upcoming information.
Pre-instructional Assignments Researchers have investigated the effects of pre-instruction materials and modules and have found positive relationships to student learning. For example, in just-in-time-teaching (Marrs & Novak, 2004; Novak, Patterson, Gavrin, & Christian, 1999), students prepare for class through accessing online resources and completing assignments that the instructor reviews a few hours before class starts and then adapts the class session as needed. Another approach, interteaching (Boyce & Hineline, 2002; Saville, Zinn, & Elliott, 2005; Saville, Zinn, Neef, Norman, & Ferreri, 2006; Saville et al., 2014), has the instructor create an online preparation guide that includes five to ten items students must complete. In class, students first hear a brief clarifying lecture. They then pair up and spend the remaining class time discussing their individual responses to the preparation guide and completing a record in which they indicate items they would like the teacher to review in more detail. The teacher then uses this to create the next preparation guide. In team-based learning, students demonstrate their preparation through readiness assurance tests (Michaelsen, Davidson, & Major, 2014). Other researchers (see, for example, Chen, Stelzer, & Gladding, 2010; Moravec, Williams, Aguilar-Roca, & O'Dowd, 2010; Nevid & Mahon, 2009) have investigated similar uses of pre-instruction tutorials and quizzes and have found that such activities not only deepened student understanding and enhanced performance on exams but also that students appreciated the activities and believed that the activities aided in their understanding of course material.
Interest and Prior Knowledge Stimulators One challenge to transmission lectures is that students often come in thinking about outside interests and have very little to help them set those aside and focus attention to a lecture. Interest stimulators attract students' attention to an upcoming topic and entice them to want to learn about it. Researchers have found that offering a stimulus such as an intriguing graphic, quotation, poem, game, or puzzle that elevates interest can increase student learning. For example, Rosegard and Wilson's (2013) investigation of using hooks prior to lectures demonstrated that students in the stimulus group outperformed those in the control group on knowledge retention. In addition, Moukperian and Woloshyn (2013) found that providing and then activating prior knowledge improved student learning.
Attention
It makes sense that students who are focused and attentive during a lecture learn more than those who aren't. Researchers have examined the kinds of activities that students can do either throughout the lecture or at some point within the lecture to help them pay attention and have found several strategies that can help improve student learning. We have used this research as the foundation for our techniques, but here we focus on summarizing key studies on guided note-taking and on asking students questions.
Guided Note-Taking Students are often poor note-takers, and many need scaffolding to be effective at this important skill. Researchers have identified strategies teachers can use to help guide students to take better notes. For example, providing an outline or other partial structure that students fill in during note-taking has improved student performance (Austin et al., 2004; Raver & Maydosz, 2010). These partial structures help students engage with the material and, if provided in a form of a handout, prompt students to handwrite the lecture's most essential concepts (see Maier, 2016; Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Weimer, 2016, for research findings on the importance of handwritten notes).
Some lecturers use cues so that students can create better notes, and research suggests that this strategy can improve learning. Titsworth and Kiewra (2004), for example, found that cues increased the number of organizational points and details students recorded in their notes and that it raised student achievement. Scerbo and others (1992) found that students who were given spoken cues recorded more information and retained it better. Rather than cues that directed students to a lecture's organization, Hackathorn and others (2010) used cues that prompted students to connect the lecture material to their own personal stories and found that this increased students' depth of learning.
Not surprisingly, prompting students to revise their notes, and providing them with opportunities to do so, improves student learning. Luo, Kiewra, and Samuelson (2016), for example, investigated the relationship between notes revision and student performance and found three effects across two experiments: (1) students who revised their notes recorded more additional notes and achieved somewhat higher scores on relationship items than those students who simply recopied their notes, (2) students who revised their notes during pauses outperformed those who revised after the lecture, and (3) students who revised notes with partners recorded more original notes than those revising alone.
Asking Students Questions Asking students questions during and after lectures has long been a popular teaching strategy. The trouble is that questions can be used ineffectively, with instructors providing too little time for students to think, too few students volunteering answers, and so forth. Research supports questioning, but it also suggests that a structured and intentional approach is best. Mazur (1997), for example, created a method he calls peer instruction to make lectures more interactive and to get students intellectually engaged with the lecture material. In this method, the instructor asks students to consider individually their response to a carefully constructed question and then discuss it with a peer, after which they respond again. Several studies have documented the effectiveness of this approach (Crouch & Mazur, 2001; Fagen, Crouch, & Mazur, 2003). Mazur and others now use automated response systems (clickers) to record student responses, and a flurry of literature evaluating the use of these systems generally shows that, when done well, clickers improve student learning (Bruff, 2009; Bunce, Flens, & Neiles, 2010; Duncan, 2005; Keough, 2012; McDermott & Redish, 1999).
Use
The time between presentation segments of an interactive lecture can be used for a variety of learning activities that ask students to apply and use the information they have just gained. Here we provide a brief overview of research on discussion and small-group work as examples of ways in which students can apply what they have learned.
Discussion Student discussions are frequently used in college courses, in part because small-group or pair discussions can be implemented effectively in many different class sizes. In an early empirical investigation of the discussion method used in a college classroom, Axelrod, Bloom, Ginsburg, O'Meara, and Williams (1949) studied differences between student learning in full-lecture classes and in lecture-discussion classes. The researchers found that students who experienced lecture and discussion were generally more satisfied with their learning than those in transmission lecture classes. Later studies (for example, DiVesta & Smith, 1979; Garside, 1996) upheld Axelrod and others' findings. More recent research also seems to confirm the early results. Jones (2014), for example, studied how the addition of in-class discussion groups related to student interest and engagement in the course, critical thinking, application skills, and satisfaction with the course. Jones found that the addition of discussion groups was related to increased learning outcomes and student understanding and engagement with new ideas and information.
Small-Group Work Many professors have organized students into small groups to complete a number of different activities, such as problem-solving, reciprocal teaching, and academic games. Researchers have investigated small-group learning, whether using cooperative, collaborative, or peer learning, for several decades. Research reports have consistently documented a positive relationship between use of small-group work and student learning outcomes (Barkley, Major, & Cross, 2014; Davidson & Major, 2014). For example, Johnson, Johnson, and Smith (2014) documented learning gains in several key areas, including knowledge development, critical thinking, problem-solving, and affective skills such as teamwork and self-confidence. Studies that focus on different types of group learning show increases in learning as well (Doymus, Karacop, & Simsek, 2010; Karacop & Doymus, 2013; Maden, 2010; Youdas, Krouse, Hellyer, Hollman, & Rindflesh, 2007).
Closure
Researchers have examined the effects on learning of various strategies that are typically implemented following student access to content. We next look at the research on quizzes and their impact on retrieval, retention, and transfer as well as research on the influence of metacognitive activities such as reflection.
Quizzes An essential component of the learning process is the ability to access and retrieve information when needed. Requiring students to spend some of their learning time on retrieving the information you want them to remember has been found to increase long-term retention of information. The testing effect indicates that frequent quizzing or testing improves learning. Multiple studies over time have identified the positive influence on learning that results from frequent quizzing (see, for example, Fitch, Drucker, & Norton, 1951; Gaynor & Millham, 1976; McDaniel, Anderson, Derbish, & Morrisette, 2007; McDaniel, Roediger, & McDermott, 2007). A growing line of research has also documented indirect benefits of quizzing and testing for learning transfer (Pastötter & Bäuml, 2014; Roediger, Putnam, & Smith, 2011; Szpunar, McDermott, & Roediger, 2008). Thus the research generally shows that frequent quizzing enhances students' ability to learn and retain information long term.
Metacognitive Reflection Asking students to reflect on their learning has become a more common teaching strategy, given the rise of interest in metacognition and self-regulation. Flavell (1976, 1979) distinguished two characteristics of metacognition: knowledge of cognition (what Fink (2013) refers to as learning about learning) and self-regulation of cognition (what Fink (2013) refers to as self-directed learning). Nilson (2013) argues that metacognition is an important component of self-regulation, but the self-cognition is the larger concept:
. . . self-regulation encompasses the monitoring and managing of one's cognitive processes as well as the awareness of and control over one's emotions, motivations, behavior, and environment as related to learning. (p. 5)
There is a growing body of research studies that indicate that activities such as planning how to approach a given learning task, monitoring comprehension, and evaluating progress toward the completion of a task play a critical role in successful learning in college and university courses. Zhao, Wardeska, McGuire, and Cook (2014), for example, documented that metacognitive activities helped students move beyond surface approaches of memorization to deeper learning. Kauffman, Ge, Xie, and Chen (2008) examined how self-reflection improved students' capacity to solve problems and found that students who received prompts wrote with more clarity than those who did not. And Cacciamani, Cesareni, Martini, Ferrini, and Fujita (2012) found that ample opportunities for metacognitive reflection in an online class fostered higher levels of agency for sharing ideas and working with others.
Synthesis of the Research on Active Learning
The research suggests four main areas of active learning that require students to engage in lectures. In Table 2.4 we illustrate the differences in learner stances between transmission lectures and interactive lectures.
Table 2.4 Contrasting Learner Stances and Roles in Transmission and Interactive Lectures
| Transmission Lectures | Interactive Lectures | |
| Prepare |
|
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| Attend |
|
|
| Use |
|
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| Assess |
|
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Techniques for Promoting Active Learning
The techniques in Part 3 of this book are intentionally designed active-learning activities that encourage specific forms of student engagement during a lecture session. They are not active learning activities for active learning's sake but rather are active learning activities carefully crafted for the purpose of lecture engagement. Our techniques help faculty members minimize the constraints to learning in the transmission lecture by offering teachers ways to help students be better involved in the lecture classroom. Our proposal for implementing the theoretical interactive lecture into practice involves thinking about the lecture process as consisting of four phases, each with a specific learning goal designed to ameliorate the constraints to learning of the transmission-model lecture, as illustrated in Figure 2.3.
Figure 2.3 The Four Phases of Active Learning during the Interactive Lecture
We subdivide each of these four phases into subprocesses that support achievement of that phase's learning goal. For the third phase, the word use is chosen because it includes a wide range of learner processes such as apply, synthesize, and create.
The techniques in Part 3 of this book scaffold student learning through the use of activities that correlate to these four phases, as identified in Table 2.5.
Table 2.5 Active Learning Phases Correlated to the Active Learning Techniques
| Active Learning Phase and Technique Category | Helps students to . . . | Corresponding Chapters |
| Prepare | Prepare to receive presented material through working ahead, accessing prior knowledge, or using that knowledge to anticipate lecture content |
|
| Attend | Focus their attention and listen actively to the lecture or create a meaningful record of information they learn in the lecture |
|
| Use | Use content, ideas, and information in ways that give it significance through rehearsal or application |
|
| Assess | Check as well as reflect on their understanding |
|
The interactive lecture techniques help students to be better participants in the lecture classroom by encouraging students to think ahead, focus on new information, apply this information, and then self-assess their knowledge and learning. In this way, students are not passive but instead are active participants throughout the lecture session.
Conclusion
Interactive lectures combine engaging presentations with activities that promote active learning. In so doing, they help today's college teachers create a dynamic learning environment that weaves together multiple pedagogical approaches to improve student learning. An interactive lecture entails creating engaging presentations that motivate students to invest the energy to learn. It then embeds this presentation within a carefully crafted sequence of activities that help students receive, understand, process, and retain presentation content.
Engaging lecture Tips and active learning Techniques help teachers implement the interactive lecture. The Tips provide teachers with a range of practical and concise pointers on what they can do to design and give engaging presentations. The Techniques provide teachers with specific learning activities that they can implement in conjunction with their lectures that have an abundance of theoretical grounding to support their efficacy in the learning process. Thus the Tips provide guidance on what teachers can do, whereas the Techniques offer guidance on what teachers can assign students to do to support their learning. Together, the Tips and Techniques offer a clear and practical blueprint for creating class sessions that implement the interactive lecturing model, thereby addressing the learning constraints of the transmission lecture and capitalizing on what we know works from research on student learning.