Hello again. Welcome to Unit Four. The first few units have been about theory, and constructing curriculum, as well as thinking about assessments. And now, we're going to get into the more specific issues of which instructional methods to choose, and we'll break it into the types of domains that we're trying to cover. So, knowledge domains. Skills and attitudes. So this first lecture for this section will be about active learning in large lectures. What we'll talk about is understanding the principles of cognitive processing. We'll think about how to structure a lecture for the maximum effect. And also ways to engage a large audience. And before we go further, I want to make sure that you have the handout either to write on or to use electronically. So, the first question is, why lecture at all? Well as you probably already know, lecturing is efficient. You can transfer a large amount of knowledge to a large group of people, or hopefully just review developments or highlight key issues of fact. But I think mainly the reason why we all still lecture is because it maybe what we have always done. So let's talk for a minute about cognitive processing and what happens when someone is sitting in a lecture and what do they need to do with the information. So, first the input comes from a multitude of sensory systems. It can come from visual systems. It can come from auditory systems. in other situations it may come from tactile sensory systems. You get the idea. So once you got that input, either auditory or visual in the case of a lecture. The brain needs to process and identify the information. So the processing that occurs involves whether or not this object that you're trying to process is familiar or unfamiliar. Have I heard this information before, or is this new information? Is it like something I've recognized, or memorized before, and where does it go? How do I categorize it? And then once I have sense of, I know what it is, I know that it's new or unfamiliar, I know what it needs to be or go with, then I can put it into storage or memory. And so the three important pieces of cognitive processing are to make sure that the information has some sort of context, that it gets coded appropriately And then it gets anchored with other information that already exists in memory. So thinking about new versus familiar information, the new information that people hear in a lecture or see on the screen is going to require processing time. And the familiar information actually requires time to connect and catalogue. So either way, people need time to process the information that you're giving them. And so I want to go through ways in a lecture that you can help people do that, either process new information, or make familiar information. into a catalog. And so the other way to think about it, is how do you make that knowledge stick? So again, let's break it down to anatomy of a lecture. The data shows that attention is highest for the first 10 to 15 minutes of an hour lecture. And the last five minutes. Probably because the last five minutes, everyone is thinking about how they get to leave, and the first 10 to 15 minutes people are curious and interested in the conversation. And as time goes on, their ability to process and to pay attention wanes. It's part of the reason why these lectures that we're making are between 8 and 12 minutes long on average. Because that's generally what most poeple can pay attention to. So we're breaking things into chunks, and many people have worked through a lecture and have been told that you want to break your hour lecture into ten to 15-minute chunks, and when you're chunking the information you want to create sort of transition slides, or inter, slides that break up the information. So sometimes in my slides I'll put a cartoon up, or people will put Pictures to help sort of transition etc. But the important thing is that when you are lecturing you want to give your listeners signals. What it is you are talking about, what comes next and then take the time when you are switching topics to provide a small summary and work your way into segues. So it's a little meta for me right now to be giving this lecture, because I've purposely been creating signals, summaries and segways to move us through. So we did a whole section on presentation skills. I just want to take a minute to remind us. So remember that visual aids in a lecture can be very important, in terms of pictures Diagrams, slide animations, using videos can be helpful and also providing audio. Again, it changes up the venue, so instead of having someone talking for a continuous amount of time. You can interrupt whatever processing is happening by asking them to use a different sensory input. So if you include audio or if you can include a video, or if you actually ask people to justs sort of look up and look at the diagram. Remember that your voice tonality, pacing and volume is going to be very important. We've all had the chance to listen to somebody who talks with this, without any sort of tonation and no movement. This will put everybody to sleep, including the person who's speaking. So there's lots of presentation skills, and, and, sort of, Performance pieces that can go into presenting. And not everyone is skilled at that, obviously. We'd all be actors if that were the case. But, you can actually learn to slow yourself down, speak more clearly, and especially when you've come to something important, to repeated it in a variety of ways. So I personally do that, by creating metaphors, by doing things that will make it stick. So you've seen me use pictures, you've seen me use allegories, like tying a show. But the other thing that's really important to remember, is that, the metaphor needs to be culturally relevant. As well as respectful. So because I live in the midwest in the United States, I have a cultural context which may or may not apply to every place else on the planet where we're watching this video. The other thing that is really helpful with presentation skills is to take the information that you are delivering. And then switch it around into a story to establish a context, to allow for processing time. The stories can actually act as a summary or reinforcement, or again to provide that context so that the learner can say, this is a familiar construct, this is an unfamiliar construct. I need to figure out where in my file folder it goes and place it in the right spot. So I sometimes will do this in a variety of ways within the slide. So in this case, this is a slide we've seen before, but what I've done here is I've actually taken the text at the bottom and made it bold. So it signals to the learner that those are important words about context, coding and anchoring. To help people place information that's delivered in a lecture into their memory. Or into storage. Again this is another example of highlighting the key information. As well as linking the information to visual representations. So while the lecturer has a pretty big responsibility in terms of delivering information, the listener also has a piece to play. And it's very difficult but you often should come to a class prepared. Now, when you are in an undergraduate situation or you're in a formal lecture then you often will have the material ahead of time. If you're in a conference or some other business meeting, you may not be able to preview the material. But you will actually learn more if you come to the lecture prepared. The other thing that can be very helpful is actually taking notes while you are listening. And so the note taking actually requires not only cognitive processing, but also technical skills because you have to write or move the mouse around or type or do something to help you process the information in a different way. Some individuals are very good at taking notes verbatim, especially if they have a previous recording. They can stop the recording and write things. But many studies have shown that if you take the concepts that are given in a lecture and map them, That you actually can learn more, and learn more efficiency, because what you're doing is you're taking the information that was given to you so that knowledge that's on the bottom of Bloom's taxonomy and either organizing it or analyzing it and restructuring it for yourself. That then allows you to put it into your brain. The other thing that works well is to be able to review or reflect on the information soon after the session, to be able to solidify the information in memory. So often, in a perfect world, you would come to class prepared, you would be able to take notes, or draw concept maps, and then review and reflect on the information some time proximal to the lecture. So how do you make it a lot more fun to sit in lecture? Well, the first thing you can do is add handouts. And so, hopefully, you've already figured out my technique by now, which is that you're filling one out, right? I've made an interactive outline that has fill in the blanks and questions that relate to what I'm saying in the lecture. Now you could give just a straight outline and have people fill that out or you could give a static handout, which is comprised of key or complex components or actually transcripts. Now, the challenge with handouts though, is that if they're too empty, then individuals don't know where to code and place the information. If they're too complex people may actually read the hand-outs ahead of time. So it's this nice balance of, of enough but not enough. Alright? the other thing you can do when in a lecture is you can ask questions. And have people hold up colored cards. Or signs with numbers or letters. Sometimes I'll even try to get the sense of the audience. And ask questions, such as, You know, all of those who are pharmisists please stand up. Or, all of you who have been to Europe, please stand up. The other thing you can do is actually have everyone in the room stand up and have them sit down in groups. Again, things to think about from the learners perspective, we've all sat in one of those. Large lecture rooms, where somebody makes you do something, like standing up or sitting down. And it can feel awkward. So you don't want to sort of use that technique too much. But again, I'm just offering suggestions for things that may work within your own context. So another thing that I do, which actually kind of drives my students crazy a little bit are something called one minute papers. So you've expected them to come to class prepared. And in the first part of your lecture, literally the first minute. You can ask them to, answer a question on a piece of paper. So the question can be a provocative question that stimulates ideas. Or that actually, demonstrates that they did the work before they came to class. often these one minute papers are not shared. They're not handed in. But they're a way to engage your audience and help to tune into what's going to be important during the lecture I often will break the lecture up into small discussion groups. So, depending on the size of the room, and the structure of the room. You can break people into small groups to work problems sets which then we spend about five to ten minutes having them work the problem set and then have them come back together. Or you can break them into small groups to sort of have a, many people call it buzz group to talk about controversial issues. In either case, it takes some of the onus away from you as the lecturer. And makes the interaction much more active and the learners actually can learn from one another. We'll talk a lot about technology and I'm sure you know variety of ways to get people active in class and I won't go through that now, because I do have another module later on about technology. Some people like to add game shows or competitions. I can tell you that I sometimes would lecture at the dental school and just to be fun and silly, I will bring bags of candy and ask questions and so people who get the correct answers would get candy. One other piece of, sort off, active things that work is to use something called a, Think-pair-share. So you propose a question. You pair students up. You have them share with the answer. And then bring them back to the large group. To then provide the answers. Or further the, the discussion. So the other new, new thing that I know many of us are familiar with is something called flipped classrooms. What this is, is that students are watching instructional videos that are given outside of class, and outside of class they're given tasks and questions and come to class prepared. Now some who have backgrounds in literature or the humanities owuld argue that that's sort of what you always do in class, right? Which is that you read the play or you read the material and you come to class, and the class is meant to explain and further delve into The, piece of literature you just read. So this really isn't that new of a concept. But basically the point is, that the actual class time when you have people in the room is spent in active engagement with the material rather than a hundred people sitting and being passive and listening to the instructor. Just basically provide knowledge. So the knowledge content is provided outside of room. With small videos. Or with reading assignments. And then the individuals come into class ready to actively engage the material. The one key thing that's important in all of this is that a flipped class group requires very careful palnning. And I would recommend that rather than bringing people back into a large lecture format, that when you're bringing people back from flipping a class, that you actually have the opportunity to break them into small groups so they can actively process the information. This concludes the section on lecturing. This secion, along with the previous one about oral presentations, will hopefully help your. Comfort level and your skill level in giving large lectures. Now, we'll continue on with the next segments about how to deliver knowledge to large groups of people and also smaller groups of people. See you soon.
