Substance over Style

Maybe your supervisor is unavailable and asks you to fill in, or you’re applying for your first teaching job at a University.  You’ve been asked to present your very first lecture, and it can be a daunting process. The advice I’ve seen online seems to focus disproportionately on style – interesting or funny anecdotes, attention-grabbing graphics, and powerful quotes.  These strategies may make for memorable moments, but can’t overcome inconsistencies in your learning or assessment design.

My personal preference is to advocate for substance over style, and over the years my conversations with learning designers have improved my approach to teaching more than any quick tips on “how to be more engaging”. I’m not a learning designer, but here are some of their strategies that I’ve found to be most useful when getting started:

Why should students care?

I think it’s fair to say that the student experience is more complicated than ever, and teachers need to do a fair amount of target audience research before you even start preparing your first lecture.  What degree are your students enrolled in, and at what year level? How many lectures have they had so far, what topics were covered, and in what depth?  Are there any other learning activities before or after your lecture, and how does your topic fit in with assessment in the course?  Perhaps most important of all - is the topic relevant in any way to current affairs, and can you connect the material to students’ everyday lives?  Once you know what your students are dealing with, you can then set the right learning objectives for your class.

Learning Objectives

It’s very easy to be caught up with what you’re going to teach and how you’re going to teach it, but ultimately what matters is what students learn.  Learning objectives define what students should be able to demonstrate by the end of a lecture, learning activity, or course.  These guide your thinking about how to organise the material and are also useful for students as part of their revision. For a 1 hour lecture you’d typically want to set 3-5 learning objectives, higher up on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning complexity – not just “define” or “describe”, but instead higher order learning that encourages students to “compare and contrast” or “explain and evaluate” a range of concepts.  

Setting the objectives for your lecture or learning activity

Constructive Alignment

According to Biggs’ theory of Constructive Alignment, learning objectives need to align with the learning activity, which aligns with the assessment tasks that ultimately evaluate student learning.  Each of these components are aligned, in sync, and promote students’ active construction of their own understanding.  You should consider writing some draft questions before you even write the lecture itself – this makes it more likely that the content you are presenting is directly aligned to the style of questions you want students to be able to answer in the final exam, which perfectly aligns back with your learning objectives.

Active Learning

Active learning can be explained through the learning theory of Constructivism – students need to actively construct their own understanding to maximise learning, instead of passively receiving the information from their teachers.  In 2014, Freeman et al. conducted a meta-analysis of 225 studies comparing student performance in STEM courses that incorporated active-learning instead of traditional lecturing.  They found that students in active-learning classes on average demonstrated a 6% improvement in exam scores and students in traditional lecturing classes were 1.5X more likely to fail the course overall.  Now this doesn’t mean every class you teach has to be nothing but problem-solving. You can start by interspersing short quiz questions throughout your lecture, and think pair share activities are also a viable option.  

Preparing your slides

On average 30 slides is what most lecturers can cover in a 1 hour timeslot, especially once you factor in active-learning discussions. Use photos and diagrams wherever possible to support or replace text, and embedding audio or video clips can present the same concept through different perspectives.  Each slide should have clear headings against a backdrop using simple colour schemes, and core concepts should be highlighted to signal their importance to students.  Including sample questions into the slides themselves will emphasise active learning as part of the lecture structure, and also help students see the alignment between the material and the learning objectives.  The reason that this is the last point I’m focusing on is that your slides will make more sense to everyone (including yourself) if you’ve already figured out the learning objectives and how you’d like to assess them.  We can get caught up in the busy work of making pretty graphics and powerpoint slides, and can lose sight of what matters most at the end of the day – how they facilitate student learning as part of an overall learning activity.   

I go through these tips in more detail in the video linked below. Here’s to all the learning designers!

Jack.