According to a recent study by the National Center for Educational Statistics, around 83% of college and university faculty rely on the lecture as their primary instructional method. Lectures have obvious advantages: they allow for a broad transmission of factual knowledge to a large number of people and they allow instructors to customize and organize the class material in the way they best see fit. But as Nira Hativa suggests, an effective lecture does more than communicate information: "[i]t arouses interest and motivation; promotes concentration and attention; identifies and marks the most important information; and enables effective cognitive processing, storing, and information retrieval" (76). Charles W. Eliot, former President of Harvard, put it differently: "The lecturer pumps laboriously into sieves. The water may be wholesome, but it runs through. A mind must work to grow" (cited in Bok, 123). The links and resources below offer strategies for making minds work during a lecture.

Strategies and Resources

General

• Delivering a lecture (Barbara Gross Davis - Tools for Teaching, Univ. of Berkeley).
• How to create memorable lectures (Newsletter from Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning)
• IDEA Item #13: “Introduced stimulating ideas about the subject” from the POD — IDEA Center Notes archive

Making lectures interactive

• Twenty ways to make lectures more participatory (Harvard's Bok Center)
• The interactive lecture (Carleton College)
• Using clickers in the classroom
• Using ConcepTests

Motivating the students to do the reading

DePaul Faculty Publications on Lectures

Rotenberg, R. (2005). "The lecture classroom." Chapter in The art and craft of college teaching: A guide for new professors and graduate students. Walnut Creek, CA. 

Additional Readings

Bligh, D.A. (2000). What's the use of lectures? San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bok, D. (2006). Our underachieving colleges: A candid look at how much students learn and why they should be learning more. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Hativa, N. (2000). "Lecturing and Explaining." Chapter in Teaching for effective learning in higher education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Instructional Technology Development (ITD)

• Getting started with clickers
• Clickers training

Office for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

• Research on lecture