This article appears in The Best of the 2023 Teaching Professor Conference (Magna Publications, 2023).
All the world’s a stage—particularly your seated, online, or hybrid classroom, where slides can set the scene, provide drama, and sing backing vocals. Unfortunately, many faculty matriculated in an era when wordy,
Do you teach a 50-minute class? Or perhaps you teach a longer block of time: 75 minutes, three hours, or even six hours, like I am currently doing? Lecture breaks can be used every 20 to 30 minutes to enhance student learning by providing:
● a
While many of us know by now that lecture alone is incongruent with student learning, it remains the predominant form of teaching—and understandably so. Pedagogical change is not a natural function in college classrooms, and it is challenging to learn and implement new teaching strategies.
Most teachers still lecture a lot despite evidence showing that straight lecture is less effective than teaching approaches that more actively engage and involve students. I don’t think that conclusion rules out didactic instruction. Sometimes it makes sense to just “tell” students about the content.
TED Talks have come to represent the pinnacle of effective presentations. They are concise, engaging, and memorable. They are also, increasingly, the yardstick by which speakers—including university faculty—are measured.
There are purists among us who would say that we should never lecture, but I don’t think that’s terribly realistic, and I’m still not ready to totally rule out lectures. As faculty, we bring expertise to learners and having an expert around when you
A recent classroom observation reminded me that student participation can be encouraged and supported by attention to small but important presentational details. In this article I have highlighted these details in the form of questions, and I hope that you’ll use them to reflect
Can we reform teaching and learning throughout higher education one class at a time? I used to think so, but the pace of change has made me less optimistic. I just finished preparing an article for The Teaching Professor newsletter that reports the
In November I had the great privilege of interviewing Parker Palmer. If you don’t know his book, The Courage to Teach, it’s one not to miss. If you haven’t read it in a while, it merits a reread. After reading it again,
The recent post on PowerPoint use generated a healthy response. That’s encouraging, but blog exchanges can seem like conversations without conclusions. There is no summary, no distillation, and no set of next questions. And when there are many comments, I worry that those
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