Advice for new faculty suggests that, when lecturing on
material that is familiar to you, you should spend two to three hours to
prepare a one hour lecture. If you’ve given the lecture before, it should take
you a half hour or less.
That time frame might
seem undoable/possibly insane. The goal of this post is convince you
otherwise.
In fact, I’m going to
suggest that spending less time preparing can lead to better lectures. This is
because excessive preparation can mire you in details that are not essential
for students to learn. Research consistently shows that student retention is higher when less
material is presented. Excessive preparation also encourages you to fill the entire
lecture period with lecturing, which is not optimal for student learning.
So how can you prevent
yourself from over preparing for a lecture? Here are some suggestions:
(1) Specify learning goals first
Identifying at the
outset how you want your students to be different at the end of the lecture
will help you focus your preparation. It will also prevent you from wasting
time gathering supporting materials that you won’t end up using. A good
guideline is to limit yourself to 2-3 learning goals for an hour-long lecture.
(2) Cover less content
The less content you
intend to cover, the less time you will need to spend preparing it. It might be
tempting to try to impress the audience with the breadth and depth of your
knowledge about the topic, but there is only so much new information that
students can process in a given lecture.[1] So focus on
conveying a few ideas well, rather than a lot of ideas poorly. Doing so will
allow you to reiterate main points, provide examples, and connect the content to
your students’ own experiences—all of which will aid student retention.
If you’re finding it
hard to limit the scope of your lecture, consider assigning readings that will
provide students will basic facts and background information about the topic,
leaving you to focus on the problems, puzzles, and debates that make the
subject interesting to you.
(3) Let students do some of the work
Don’t plan to lecture
for the full period. Instead, plan mini discussion sections, group work, short
debates, or other activities that allow students to engage with the material
actively (more ideas here). Since students retain
much more information in interactively taught lectures than in traditional
ones, it will also improve student retention. (For example, one study found that after two
weeks, we remember only 20% of what we hear out loud, but 70% of what we say
ourselves.)
(4) Don’t reinvent the wheel
Even if you are
preparing a lecture that you have never prepared before, chances are someone
has prepared one on the same topic. If you are giving a guest lecture in an
existing course, ask the primary instructor for his or her lecture notes and
materials from previous years. If you are preparing lectures for a course that
has been taught in your department before, ask your colleagues for their
materials.
(5) Prepare an outline, rather than a script
Prepare an outline that
includes your main points, evidence to support them, questions you want to ask,
and activities that you will include, but don’t write out a full script—it’s
simply too time consuming. Reading from a script also prevents you from
maintaining eye contact with students and can make your delivery sound rehearsed.
If you are nervous, consider writing a script for the introduction to your
lecture to ensure you start off fluidly, then working from an outline for the rest
of the talk.
(6) Embrace imperfection
This suggestion is for
those of you who (like me) have perfectionist tendencies. You know who you are! In giving a lecture, it’s okay if you are less succinct
than you would be if you wrote the whole thing out. It’s okay if you don’t have
the answer to every question that a student asks. (In fact, admitting what you
don’t know can improve your credibility as an instructor). In short, it’s okay
if your lecture isn’t “perfect.” If you approach each lecture as learning
experience and welcome feedback, you’ll take some of the pressure off yourself
and be able to continuously develop your skills as a lecturer.
I hope that this post
has given you some ideas about how to prepare lectures efficiently, and
convinced you that when it comes to lecture preparation, more time will not
necessarily lead to better learning outcomes for your students.
Are there any other time
saving tips that you have used when preparing a lecture? Please leave them in
the comments below!
[1] Russell et al. (1984) compared
student retention following lectures in which 90% of the sentences conveyed new
information to lectures in which 70% and 50% did. The authors found that
students learned and retained the most information when the least amount was
presented.
