I am not merely a teacher, I am also a learner, and I think this semester I will find it useful to take notes on the lecturers and their lecturing styles. Not only can I improve my own teaching, but it will help me pay attention in lectures. If I am focusing on what the lecturer is saying, it is easy to absorb required information.
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- Powerpoint slides were not utilised to maximal efficiency. With a tool like PowerPoint, you have absolute control over what is visible to the audience. If you don't plan to explain a particular point until later, keep it completely out of view. Putting redundant information on the slide simply increases information density and makes it harder for the audience to understand what you are trying to express.
- Vary pace of elocution depending on the importance of the content. If you are saying something that is important for everyone to remember, state each word clearly, slowly, and loudly. The tone and pace of speaking helps to convey subconscious information and is a valuable technique. If the information is especially important, put it on the screen for visual persistence.
Conversely, if you are speaking words which are less important, it isn't a problem to speak a bit more quickly. Read: a bit more quickly - speaking quickly is never a good thing. Speaking quickly conveys impatience and/or excitement - we are trying to aim for excitement rather than impatience, so try to inject enthusiasm and energy into your voice as well.
What words are less important? If they're less important, why bother speaking them at all? For one, English necessitates the use of less important words when speaking. Joining words, for example. Miscellaneous facts, as another example.
Suppose you said "C is an example of a programming language. There are many others! For example, Java, Python, and Ruby." The main point consists of three words: "C", "programming", "language". Those would be spoken the slowest. Less important words are "example", "Java", "Python", "Ruby", and can be spoken a bit faster. The least important words are the joining words - i.e. "is an", "of a", "There are many others", "For", "and". These illustrate nothing, and merely serve to join your sentence together. They can be spoken yet a bit more quickly.
If you say something of great magnitude, pause for some time after saying it. "In this course, your assignments will be worth no marks." [pause for 5-10s]. As George Sperling discovered, the sensory memory register that handles audio lasts for multiple seconds before decay - even if the student wasn't paying attention while you were saying the phrase, they will be able to remember what you said, because the information is preserved in the sensory memory register.
- Usually pictures convey concepts far better than words can. There are multiple ways of representing information, and a picture often conveys the information in the most easily understandable and concise way. Personally, I am a huge visual learner, so I tend to lean towards having pictures and diagrams to illustrate every point, and I find that easy to understand.
A good test to see if you should be presenting your information as a picture is the question: "After they receive the information, will they have to make the cognitive effort to visualise something?" If the answer is yes, then you absolutely need a diagram, to remove the cognitive load of visualisation. Putting the burden of visualisation on the audience has multiple detriments - primary among which is that each audience member will come up with a different visualisation, and they will also be unsure whether they are visualising the correct thing.
Sometimes it is useful to purposefully get the audience to visualise something. "Imagine ....". This feels like a typical example of a constructivist methodology. You are getting your audience to experience something themselves, and you are educating them with their own (imaginary) experience. However, I cannot see this methodology being useful in many situations. In most situations, I would not trust myself to use it effectively.
- When language issues may exist, on the part of the lecturer (accent, pronunciation) or the students (international students, especially first-year international students), make sure elocution is exceptionally slow and carefully enunciated. This detracts a bit from other factors, such as the excitement you can convey and takes up cognitive space (have to concentrate on this), so it's optimal to somehow strike a balance.
Striking balances is universally difficult across all professions and skills. The sense for how to dictate this balance is probably most easily acquired through experience.
- It is often good to pause after jokes to make it clear that it was a joke. Especially if there are language difficulties, it will take the audience a short amount of time to process and think through the joke.
- Avoid duplication of audio and visual artifacts. Suppose you have a slide, and the words you are speaking are exactly the same are those on the slides. The students can easily follow what you're talking about, but this behaviour is subject to multiple major disadvantages.
The first detraction is a phenomenon called cross-modal interference. There is a lot research on this topic, but my understanding (which I have confirmed by monitoring myself in practice) is that when you hear and read something, the information does not integrate well. The reason is that words on a page (in your visual register) are converted to an audio form as they enter your working memory. This conflicts with the audio you are receiving from the lecturer, because of the time displacement and the discrepancies in tonality. The overall effect is that the information is difficult to process.
The second detraction is that the students can read much more quickly than the lecturer can speak the words. Slowing down their reading speed simply to match the pace of the lecturer is painful.
So how do we rectify this duplication of audio and visual artifacts? By replacing the text, say, with an image. Alternatively, summarising the visual text in 2-3 words, and elaborating on it. That way, the students can easily follow the focus of the lecture, but we do not have to deal with the above two detriments to matching the lecturer's text exactly.
While it is usually a bad idea to match the lecturer's speaking exactly, it is not a bad idea to match 2-3 key words in what the lecturer says. This provides a sense of structure to the information - students can categorise the new information into the correct mental schema easily, they can follow where they are up to in the slide, and feel more comfortable with what is going on.
- Romantic examples were used commonly, and they appeal to a young audience whose primary interests include romance. Using examples which are relevant and appeal to the audience's self-interest can be nothing but an advantage, because the information received will automatically be assigned a high significance when received. Additionally, they are close to the audience's emotions, and emotive information is recalled the most easily.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou
- When giving information, give contextual links often. What do I mean by contextual links? Things like, "This is what you will be learning in your labs." "This is the most important part of the [x] topic". "This would be useful if you were in the workplace and needed to do [y]". Constantly link the audience back to reality, especially if delving into theoretical matters which do not appear relevant.
The more well-contextually-linked a concept is, the more mental links the learner has to the information, and the more likely they will recall it.
- I noted that when the lecturer answered questions, his domain knowledge was excellent and the answers to questions directly got to the point. Make sure the first few words you say are directly addressed to the question. No random tangents, at least not until you state your main point.
A random thought I had: when answering questions, perhaps repeat words that the questioner used, to link the question more strongly to the answer and make sure that the questioner understands how the response links to with the question. I have encountered too many poor answerers of question that go on tangents.
- The lecturer was able to incorporate humour on an impromptu basis (in response to questions). I found this particularly impressive! Good humour is generally pre-planned. I figured, either the lecturer has a vast amount of experience to be able to generate jokes on the fly, or is simply a natural comedian.
- Be careful with the questions that you target to the audience. In lectures, there are often hundreds of people, and a single person answering a question does not really contribute that much to the other hundred people. If you are to ask a question in a lecture, it should be more of an engagement tool than anything else.
One useful technique is to ask a question slowly, then pause and look directly at the audience. The audience will be immediately engaged - asking a question in this manner feels like a response is expected of them, even though the question is rhetorical. This will swiftly bring the audience's attention directly to you for long enough to illustrate your next point.
Avoid asking questions that are obvious. No one wants to be the one to recite what you just said, or to read the response off the screen. Conversely, avoid asking questions that are too complex. Ask questions that will springboard your next point, and target them towards the lower end of your audience (the end that is paying less attention).
- Keep a title at the top of all your slides to add context to the information you are presenting.
- When you ask your audience to do something in the future, or to do something after your lecture, put it on the screen. You want something that visually persists, to aid memory, and also so that the audience has some time to process it, to link it to their plans for that day, and to remember it.
This is also a useful technique for important information.
- Talking about marks or the marks of the course automatically grabs attention, because students are interested in acquiring marks. If you want the audience to remember something, link it to self-interest, link it to something relevant to them.
- If you are done with content move it off screen. You want to get the previous point out of the audience's mind before you move on to the next point. If you leave content on screen for too long, it is more difficult to define what you are currently talking about, or focusing on.
One useful technique is to grey out text that you're not currently talking about, because then it becomes obvious it is not the focus point, but the viewer has a reference point for earlier presented information if they think "hey, what about that thing he said before?"
You would want to group related information on the same page, so the audience can easily refer back to earlier ideas in the same group or schema.
- The lecturer, interestingly enough, used lots of deceptively simple puzzles (simple to understand, difficult to solve) to engage the audience in the lecture. While it definitely engaged the audience - it forced them to think about the puzzle and about methods of solving it, I'm not sure it provided all that much teaching value. Additionally, I'm not sure about how it affects people of different skill levels, and whether the effects are good or bad.
I'm just not sure about this one, right now. Perhaps puzzles should be interspersed to provide additional engagement, or something.
- An effective method of teaching is teaching by example. One of the better ways of teaching by example is to provide copious examples and explain why they are good or bad. This is an easy way to teach more abstract concepts such as style. Each viewer will gain their own understanding from it, in a pseudo-constructivist fashion: they are learning someone else's opinions and simultaneously experiencing examples.
- Minimise the use of symbols in lecture slides - the content should be in a form where the audience can look back (if they didn't understand something) and quickly gain a shallow understanding of what they missed. Using excessive amounts of symbols prevents that.
- Clarify a distinction between important information and trivia information. Perhaps grey out trivia text to make sure it is apparent that it is less important? The faster students can take in all the trivia, but you want slower students to brush over the trivia and focus on the information that is actually important.
- Asking questions is also a good way to judge whether your audience is following. If you are getting good, high-quality answers from multiple points in the lecture theatre, you can be fairly confident that you are doing well.
- Make sure your elocution is very strongly linked to your visual aids. Either reference the visual resource visually (perhaps by drawing on it, perhaps by using a laser pointer), or reference it verbally (match words on the visual aid, talk about "that line right there, on the bottom left"). Having a focus point on the visual aid that the audience is looking at is exceedingly important so you have constructive cross-modal interactivity. When there are multiple possible focus points, you risk the audience looking at the wrong one, and experiencing negative interference (it is not immediately clear how the visual focus relates to the elocution).
- The lecturer's tone did not noticeably stand out. He was not particularly energetic, or solemn, or excited, or happy. However, he was not noticeably neutral either. Regardless, it was easy to listen to, and had no obviously visible problems.
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