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How Can I Organize Good Lectures?
By Ken Bain
We discovered that the most highly-rated lecturers nearly always have five elements
in their lectures:
- Begin with a question.
What question will the lecture help students
to understand? How can you most effectively raise that question?
Is there a story that will raise the question?
- Help students understand the significance of the question.
Call attention to significance; explain significance;
tie to previous and larger question; raise question in provocative
way so significance is self-evident, help students understand
what they will understand better or be able to do better after
listening to the lecture and thinking about it.
- Ask students to make a judgement and provide them with some basis for making the judgment.
In some cases this might mean to judge the
argument you are about to make. In others, it might be to decide
when and how to use the procedure, the method, the explanation
you offer. In still others it might be to determine the implications
of what you are concluding or to make a judgement between different
methods of solving a problem. Or it might include all of these,
and more.
- Answer the question (the heart of the lecture).
Every point that a lecture might make is an
answer to some question. Make the question clear and answer
it.
- Leave students with a problem or question.
What's the next question? Where do we go from
here? What are the implications of this material? What are the
problems in accepting this interpretation?
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