What Makes a Lecture Engaging?
Last time around I was talking about lectures versus active learning methods. I suggested that instead of treating them as either-or, we can get the best of both by combining them into something called an interactive lecture. An interactive lecture is both an engaging lecture interspersed with active learning methods. This time around, I wanted to talk briefly about the engaging lecture and will look at active learning methods to support an engaging lecture next time around.
What makes a lecture engaging? Is it short in length? After all, our attention span has become in recent years apparently less than that of a gold fish. Shorter may be preferable to longer, however, our attention span can be but isn’t always shorter than a gold fish’s. It is very much task-dependent — how much attention we apply depends on the requirements of the task at hand.
Take this video for example.
It was part of a presentation series from Carnegie Mellon University titled The Last Lecture. In it, a presenting faculty member is asked to focus their talk around one important question: if you were dying and could give one last lecture, what would it be about? In the video above, former Carnegie Mellon computer science professor gives his last lecture, titled Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams. Incredibly, it really was his last lecture as Pausch had terminal pancreatic cancer. He died ten months after giving that talk.
His talk was 75 minutes long. I’ve watched it in its entirety a few times over the years now. In preparing this post, I caught myself getting drawn in once more and starting to watch it again. I find it easy to pay attention to. I wonder of the almost 20 million views that video has had how many other people would agree with me. I imagine many.
It is easy to pay attention to because it is raw and emotional. And emotional events, evidence has established, are remembered more clearly, accurately and for longer periods of time than are neutral events. If we remember emotional events better than we obviously pay attention to them better in the first place. So creating emotion is important to an engaging lecture, however, it can’t be or won’t be the kind of emotion reflected in Pausch’s talk. It doesn’t have to be. It could also be:
· A question or hook that intrigues the listener, makes them curious and encourages them to want to know more.
· A personal connection to the learner — something that shows them what’s in it for them, or how it could impact them or how it relates to them.
It’s not about sleek graphics or the presentation software you use, says a Fast Company article on emotionally intelligent PowerPoint design. It’s about whether the story you tell resonates with your audience’s needs. Err…well…it’s at least a bit about slide design. An engaging lecture may be short. An engaging lecture definitely invokes emotion. And an engaging lecture is also made engaging by the support of a well-designed slideshow.
Richard Mayer, is an American educational psychologist, whose biggest contribution to the field has been his multimedia learning theory, which states that optimal learning occurs when visual and verbal materials are presented together simultaneously. Therefore, when it comes to slide design, text and images are better than just text alone or just images alone — unless those images are supported by spoken text (i.e., narration).
You see audio and visuals are processed separately, according to current learning theories (see Baddeley & Hitch and Paivio). Providing input to each at the same time, instead of just to one or the other, maximizes the opportunity to learn the content. There is no shortage of help out there for us to learn to design slides that attune with this multimedia approach. A quick Internet search on best practices for slide design reveals a multitude of useful results and so I won’t go any further into that particular topic here, maybe another time.
A good slideshow manipulates people to pay attention by giving them something to stimulate them. That could be emotional stimulation but it’s not only that. Movies, for example, are hours long and yet you don’t often see people losing their focus in those. In a movie that stimulation is lots of action, scene changes or different characters, says Director of Bright Carbon Richard Goring. In this video Goring suggests that presenters will reach a hard limit of 20 minutes before their audience will start to switch off.
And so even with a possibly compelling emotional hook and a slideshow designed for the way we actually learn, we should still consider breaking up our lecture component by switching topics. Or we can break one long lecture topic into chunks and intersperse those chunks with other activities, like asking the learners questions or getting them to engage with each other in discussion. This is where the active learning methodologies come in handy.
But what methods work best with a lecture to ensure that learners will retain the most information? More on that next time.
