Great Presentations: Tips From Great Presenters. 10 Do’s and don’ts to using PowerPoint to deliver lectures that don’t suck. Four things lecture is good for - Casting Out Nines. A lot of my posts here are about alternatives to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom.
Based on that, and on somewhat testy comments like these that I leave lying around the internet, you might get the idea that I am firmly anti-lecture. But that’s not entirely true. There are times and places where lecture works quite well, even better than the alternatives. Here are a few purposes for which I think lecture is well-suited: Modeling thought processes. Notice that what I don’t include in this list is the one thing that lectures seem most commonly used for: information transfer.
Notice also that I do not count whether a lecture is inspiring or not. But while running an entire class in the lecture format is probably not best for students, lectures do have their place, and when it makes sense to give one, we should do so with clarity, organization, and rhetorical skill. The lecture. I recently wrote that Understanding by Design is agnostic about any specific method or pedagogy. The bottom-line question has to do with validity: given the goals, what follows?
Thus, it makes little sense to say “I never lecture” or “I always do authentic assessments” as if it were a question of ideology or personal taste. As educators, we should use the methods that best work to achieve our goals. To that end, let’s consider as dispassionately as possible the oldest instructional method in formal education: the lecture. (By “lecture” I mean the typical HS and college class in which a Professor or teacher speaks for most of the period.)
As the etymology of the word suggests, the original lectures were readings. What could not be more obvious as efficient pedagogy? A deeper look at pedagogical purpose. Here are a few commonly-given reasons for lecturing: Students need to know core information. There are times and places where lecture works quite well, even better than the alternatives. Structure Your Presentation Like a Story - Nancy Duarte. By Nancy Duarte | 8:00 AM October 31, 2012 After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved.
That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle’s three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that’s easy to digest, remember, and retell. Here’s how it looks when you chart it out: And here’s how to do it in your own presentations. Craft the Beginning Start by describing life as the audience knows it. After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be. What is: We fell short of our Q3 financial goals partly because we’re understaffed and everyone’s spread too thin. Do Your Slides Pass the Glance Test? - Nancy Duarte. By Nancy Duarte | 11:00 AM October 22, 2012 An audience can’t listen to your presentation and read detailed, text-heavy slides at the same time (not without missing key parts of your message, anyway).
So make sure your slides pass what I call the glance test: People should be able to comprehend each one in about three seconds. Think of your slides as billboards. When people drive, they only briefly take their eyes off their main focus — the road — to process billboard information. Similarly, your audience should focus intently on what you’re saying, looking only briefly at your slides when you display them.
Keep It Simple Research shows that people learn more effectively from multimedia messages when they’re stripped of extraneous words, graphics, animation, and sounds. So when adding elements to your slides, have a good reason: Does the audience need to see your logo on each slide to remember who you work for?