Do you have what it takes to be a good lecturer? Use these tips to improve your teaching skills. Do you have a strong interest to teach students at university? The first five minutes of your lecture provides a golden opportunity to get your students to sit up and pay attention. Start with the obvious, introduce yourself, explain your objectives for the lecture and outline the learning outcomes.
If you begin with great passion and enthusiasm, then your students are more likely to engage from the outset. Your introduction needs to engage, excite, challenge, and create expectations so add in some interesting facts in the beginning. Scan the room after the first few minutes to gain a good indication of how engaged the students are.
The pace should be well controlled so that you are able to move through the material, keeping students engaged throughout. The planning process is important, so you have to be fully confident about the content, structure and delivery of the material before you begin. The art and craft of lecturing is full of myths about the pedagogies of engagement but what you say and how you say it are always going to be key constants.
Lecturing is a clever mix of pitch, tone, pace and presentational prowess and these will all influence your credibility. Public speaking skills are a must and lecturers need to have a little pinch of showmanship, bags of humour, and jazz hands; non-verbal communication is king. Work on your body language and you will appear and feel more relaxed, confident and authoritative.
Can there be anything worse than someone reading from a script? A lecture inevitably follows some structure and a plan but not so that it reads like a newspaper. Memorised lectures sound memorised too. The skill is to memorise the key parts of your content and allow the rest of it to be flexible and natural. Lecturers need to tell stories, ad-lib and go off-piste in order to capture their audience and do this without derailing the learning.
Making a lecture sound natural is no easy task but a rigid straight-jacket lecture that is given with a dry as a bone monotone delivery will have everyone nodding off. Voice tone, volume and pitch are all incredibly important and communicating content with expression and energy is a must.
If this means shouting, yelling or singing it then do it and be an enlarged version of yourself. Let smiling be your default position.
As a lecturer miles of smiles are important to develop rapport and ensure engagement. Smiling is the silent language of lecturing that can help transmit knowledge and engender trust. These findings have some important implications for academic practice. The key thesis advanced is that definitions of teaching excellence cannot be adequately obtained from typologies and descriptions of techniques and skills. This may uncover more profound layers of understanding of what makes good teaching at university and so probe the more elusive aspects which defy measurement via scales or performance indicators.
Su, F. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Keep slides terse: write out only the main idea with a maximum bulleted, subordinate words or very short phrases. Students hear you better when they are not distracted by on-screen readings. Slides are keynotes. The details are in your exposition of those keynotes.
Post your terse slides on the course RPILMS site before class so students have them to print as structured guides to their in-class note-taking. Lecture concentrating on essentials. Spice the essentials with well-crafted examples from real life, specific details, a joke if appropriate.
Avoid extremely specific and highly technical language, especially if you teach a first-year or an introductory course. When bringing in new language be sure to explain its meaning. Students suffer attention lapses and later forget words they do not understand. Avoid gender, race, or any other kind of bias in your language. Use inclusive language that speaks to all groups in your audience.
With a well-planned lecture, you should not be reading from slides.
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