Reads: The Interactive Lecture
The Lecture Reinvigorated
Direct instruction often gets a bad rap - and probably for good reason. I mean, as a history teacher in a previous life, I get as excited about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff as anyone, but thanks to (bad) direct instruction, the kids in this famous movie clip sure won’t.
It’s not hard to see what makes Mr. Lorensax’s (memorably portrayed by Ben Stein) famous economics lecture from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off so bad - the story isn’t interesting and he asks low-level fill-in-the-blank style questions instead of involving students in the discussion. It doesn’t matter that he’s an expert on the Hawley-Smoot Tariff (and, as a former Nixon/Ford speechwriter and the son of an economist, it’s a topic Ben Stein would have likely been more than familiar with!) - he can’t sell it because he hasn’t secured anything beyond baseline attention, let alone true commitment to the learning.
Enter The Interactive Lecture: How to Engage Students, Build Memory, and Deepen Comprehension (Silver & Perini, 2010), a self-contained professional development guide that I have taken ideas from over the years but have not had the opportunity to read cover-to-cover until now. Although it is a resource clearly meant to be used within the context of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) or educational study group, there is still value in browsing through the book solo with the goal of reinvigorating your lectures/direct instruction.
From Passive Reception to Active Engagement
Don’t be like Mr. Lorensax. Strive to find ways to turn students from passive receivers of information to active learners.
Shout out to my cooperating teacher (and a dear friend), Mr. (now Dr.) Mercer, for teaching me this lesson early in my career during my student teaching experience. While co-teaching his government classes with him, he showed me his strategy for how he made the primary and general election process easier to comprehend within the context of direct instruction. He had students draw it. And that’s how our seniors ended up using crayons, markers, colored pencils, etc. to make the elections process easier to comprehend. Students drew the winnowing process of the primaries and the penultimate competition of the general election; for example, drawing the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl. It was fun and helped to strengthen memory from the lecture and note-taking portion of the lesson. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were using elements of the interactive lecture. Students were actively constructing meaning, not just passively consuming information to be regurgitated later.
The Interactive Lecture and Distance Learning
So how in the world can you pull off an interactive lecture in a distance learning environment? It’s actually easier than you might think. Here are a few quick ideas, utilizing some of the key principles of the interactive lecture:
Before recording your lecture (or posting a lecture created by someone else), think about:
The details you will include and how your voice and mannerisms will express the passion you feel for your subject.
How you will “hook” students into the lesson - a quick video clip before you begin speaking? An open-ended discussion board question? What attention-getters do you use in the physical classroom that you can re-create online?
How you will present information in bite-sized chunks before posing questions or having students engage in online or offline activities related to the lecture (e.g. answering a question, posting on a discussion board, etc.)
You can still have students use interactive note-taking methods, like Cornell Notes, while viewing a pre-recorded lecture.
Provide a graphic organizer or encourage students to create their own as they watch and reflect upon your recorded lecture. Google Docs and Drawings are easy-to-use tools for this. Visual organizers are a huge component of the interactive lecture.
Follow-up discussions, virtual field trips, and end-of-lesson/unit synthesis tasks (like a case study, lab experiment, etc.) can all help to make the content meaningful and cement the learning.
If direct instruction is your strength, what are some ways in which you make it engaging and meaningful for students?