Creating lecture content is a responsibility about which many of us can feel ambivalent. As college professors, most of us chose our academic discipline because we found it fascinating. We can therefore “geek out” about certain areas of content or methodology, captivated with the intricacies of the ideas and their interrelations. We are also oftentimes creative individuals who enjoy making things, either through writing or designing experiments or other forms of productive expression. For all of these reasons, creating content for lectures can be an enjoyable task.

Content creation for the purpose of lecturing can also be challenging. It sometimes can be frustrating to try to figure out how to make the information relevant and accessible to students. It can be difficult, especially in classes with widely diverse learners, to identify ways for students to make connections between new information and what they already know. It can be tough trying to determine the best examples, illustrations, analogies, and so forth that will enable students to comprehend our message. In this chapter, we have identified Tips for content creation that will help you identify the central and most important ideas, and we summarize these Tips in Exhibit 4.1. Using these Tips in turn will help you make the focus of the content and its organization clear to students.