Spring Teaching Forum 2014

Registration for the annual Yale Teaching Center forum is now open!

Registration: Please register here.

Location: Sterling Memorial Library (SML) Lecture Hall (Wall Street entrance)

For more details and information, please see our website.

We look forward to seeing you there!

ATW Teaching with Social Media

Please post your activity designs below. Thank you!

-Dustin and Alex

Can daily quizzes aid student engagement?

Marco Bonett-Matiz

Physics

I'm in the middle of an explanation, when Claudia turns to John and says: "..[look, John, I think Marco is trying to say that]...the electric-potential is to the potential-energy what the electric field is to the Coulomb force!...". a spontaneous intervention by then common in my class. There was a strong sense of confidence in her words, in contrast to her personality, which was very quiet, in fact. So, how did we get there?

Hola! I am Marco Bonett-Matiz, a PhD student and YTC fellow. I am passionate about teaching, and last summer was the third time I served as the instructor of an introductory physics class. Below, I want to share the results of my experiment: the evolution of quizzes in the course, and their contribution to the sense of camaraderie and rapport among my students.

It all started when, as an undergrad, daily quizzes had a strong influence on my study habits; based on the previous day's lecture, these quizzes forced us to stay on our toes. Right then and there I decided that I would implement them in my classes.

I co-taught the first version of my Phys 181 course with my best friend here at Yale (also a YTC fellow by the way). During the planning stages, one of my strongest suggestions for the class was to implement daily quizzes. In retrospect, I was not totally aware of their effect; my thinking was: this will keep them on their toes and primed for class. Later I realized the quizzes also made them arrive on time: they started at nine sharp without delay and with no make-ups permitted. Everyone was on their seats by the beginning of the lecture and this reduced interruptions due to late comers.

For the second version of the class, I felt confident and daring: I increased the frequency of clicker questions and allowed for Think-Pair-Share (TPS) activities. However, I did not change the structure of the quizzes. I cannot be sure what triggered it, but there was a time after the end of a quiz when I couldn't start the lecture because of the noise. My students were engaged in discussion about their answers. I was so pleased that, when they finally noticed me, I suggested they finish their deliberations without rush. This was their discussion and I was only an observer. Soon after it hit me: "Next summer I will have them submit their individual answers, followed by peer-discussion and then resubmission".

Full of positive feelings and excitement, I was ready to implement some changes into the structure of the quizzes. The third time I taught the class they consisted of: Three multiple-choice questions, four minutes total for individual submission, followed by three minutes of peer-discussion before resubmission. This strategy wasn't without its problems, and at first the students resented me for not giving them enough time. We struck a deal: they would have more time at the cost of staying five minutes later at the end of class. They accepted without hesitation. This third time however, there was a noticeable change: The students felt safe to intervene and engage with the material. As a class, we had pierced through that ice that sometimes prevents students from actively participating.

Having witnessed their engagement in a relaxed environment that we had built together was among the most rewarding moments with this class.

I don't think the quizzes by themselves were the only reason for their engagement. We also had TPS questions, strong encouragement to participate, and in-class activities. But I would dare to speculate that daily quizzes followed by peer discussion planted the seed that fostered a healthy environment for participation. They created an atmosphere where it is ok to be wrong, it is ok to intervene if you think you have the right answer, and it is ok to engage in cordial discourse. The consequence was enthusiastic participation by most, as they asked questions, answered them, or gave a better version if I, as the instructor, was not able to nail it with my answer.

At first, I naively thought all I wanted was for my students to be ready for my lecture. In the process, I discovered a tool that enabled them to engage with the material and helped create a healthy environment where it was safe to participate.

In case you hadn't noticed, I didn't mention the students' motivator...I had to make the quizzes worth 15% of their grade. Without it, the efficacy of the experiment would have been greatly diminished, I'm sure.

Please feel free to share; I'd love to hear your opinion.

Cheers!

Using Film (and Video!) in the Classroom

Claudia Calhoun
Film and Media Studies and American Studies

Everybody loves movies. Teachers across all of the disciplines integrate moving images into their classrooms, whether that means full-length theatrical screenings, television episodes, or videos from YouTube. Incorporating movies is a great way to attract student interest, appeal to different learning styles, and diversify classroom activities. Films can also raise their own questions, deepening content-area discussion.

Every screening, small or large, is also an opportunity to increase students’ visual literacy. Although students enter the classroom incredible knowledge of media, they often have not been asked to look critically, to understand how images create meaning. When you use media, think about encouraging students to develop these critical capacities. This blog post will introduce you to some ways to incorporate visual thinking strategies along with your content objectives.

1. Before you show a video or film, direct students as to what to look for.

Visual Literacy Incorporation Level: EASY.

Films have many elements, and they all move! This can make it hard to keep track. Asking students to pay attention to one aspect of a video will guide discussion toward your learning goals. Let’s say that you’re showing Jimmy Fallon and the Roots’ adaptation of the Sesame Street theme song as part of a lesson within a class on Puppets in Culture. Here are two ways to frame the video:

•  Pay attention to how the theme is adapted for Fallon’s 21^st-century audience. What instruments do they use, and how do they work together?   How does Black Thought’s rap revise the original song?

• Pay attention to the performance of the puppets.  How are the characters arranged, and what is the impact of their placement? How do the human and puppet characters interact with one another in this non-Street space?

 As you can see, these questions will anchor two very different discussions, so be sure to think about what observations are most appropriate for your learning goals.

2. Have students support their observations with visual evidence.

Visual Literacy Incorporation Level: INTERMEDIATE.

Without specialized knowledge, students can use close looking, prior knowledge, and contextual associations to make strong observations.  In the Fundamentals of Teaching with Images and Objects workshops, we use a worksheet to guide a progressive (or “scaffolded”) discussion, which you can adapt for your own uses. You can download that document here.

3. Integrate film terminology into your discussions.

Visual Literacy Incorporation Level: ADVANCED.

You don’t have to be a film scholar, or even have taken an Introduction to Film course, to gain comfort using film studies terms. Learning the terminology is itself productive, as students gain the ability to express new concepts once they have the language to describe them.  There are a number of videos on YouTube that help to explain basic film terminology. One of the clearest and thorough (yet not overlong!) was posted by user Scott Bradley and is called “Intro to Film Technique and Terminology.”

Using scenes from Lord of the Rings, the video clearly illustrates a glossary of film terms. One of the strengths of Bradley’s video is that he also describes the impact of certain choices.  For example, when explaining camera angles, a scene between Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins clearly shows how “Characters shot from low angles tend to be more powerful, commanding” while “Characters shot from high angles tend to be weak, vulnerable” (2:04-3:17).

(If you’re looking for more examples and definitions than Bradley provides, another great resource for film language is Yale Film Studies’ in-depth online glossary, the Film Analysis Guide. )

One note: While The Fellowship of the Ring is a perfect example of “classical narrative” (meaning that all of the formal elements function to support an engrossing story) the film or video for your class may be aggressively un-classical. An avant-garde or ethnographic film, for example, is often not primarily concerned with narrative. Not to worry! The same language applies to non-classical films, and students who come to class with a lifetime’s worth of Hollywood films in their head will be well-prepared to draw out the differences between narrative and non-narrative filmmaking techniques.

To help students dissect an entire film, one strategy that I have had success with is to assign different formal elements to different students in the class. (This is the advanced version of the earlier suggestion, directing students what to look for.)  Before the screening, I will write the terms that we have recently learned on the board (say: lighting, camera movement, editing, sound), and ask students to choose an element on which to focus their attention.  I have found that this greatly improves the quality of the discussion after the film, allowing  us to talk in specific terms about  how each of the elements work together to create meaning – or, even better!,  where elements seem to clash with one another, and that effect that has within the film.

The next time you want to integrate film into a course, consider adding visual literacy to your learning goals. If you ask students what they see, you’ll find out what they think, too!

Have you tried using film and videos in your classroom? What activities did you design? How did students respond?

Let's Get to the Point: Implementing Two-Sentence Summaries in Your Classroom

Elizabeth Morse

Cell Biology Ph.D. Candidate, Yale Teaching Center Fellow

It's Tuesday night at 7PM, and it’s time to begin another one of your fantastically stimulating discussion sections. The article you assigned your students to read was, of course, academically intoxicating, and somehow, today, you overcame your research or grant-writing to get to this highly anticipated moment. This article represents a pivotal turning point in your field, a cataclysmic push to a new frontier of knowledge; its significance - clearly world-changing.  

 
And so you begin.    
 
“So, who wants to start us off and tell us about this week’s reading?”

Sudden silence. The pre-class chatter about exam results and Facebook and Miley Cyrus has ceased. There are twenty-three faces in front of you, carrying forty-six undergraduate eyes, and not one of them is looking at you. Did you realize how large that stain is on the carpet? Can you believe how many crumbs from dinner are now stuck behind your finger nails? Does the clock on the wall always tick that loudly?

 

Like most awkward silences, this moment was likely preventable. While I do not claim to have the miracle cure-all that will alleviate all of your symptoms of uncomfortable silence, sustained student disinterest or general academic complacency, I would like to offer you a technique proven (in my hands) to increase student engagement, bolster academic discussion and immediately focus student attention on course material. If desired, this technique can be adapted such that it simultaneously gauges initial student understanding (what the teaching world calls “pre-assessment”), takes your attendance and provides an easy means of encouraging – and grading – participation. It does just about everything but walk your dog.

Intrigued? I give you: The Two-Sentence Summary.

  

The Two-Sentence Summary: What Is It?

The beauty of the two-sentence summary is its simplicity: upon entering the classroom, students pick-up an index card and are instructed to compose a concise statement (no more than two sentences) that summarizes the main point of an assigned reading. That’s it. After students have had a few minutes to write, you, the instructor, begin class with a slightly altered version of the question above:

“So, who wants to start us off and share his or her two-sentence summary of this week’s reading?”

 Awesome. By giving students time to quietly think, and by making your initial question slightly more specific, suddenly there are hands raised. You have made your expectations clear, and you have given your students space to compose a response that reflects their current understanding of the material. The section begins with a discussion of the most important, take-home message, and you can immediately assess whether your students identified this point (or points) or will need your guidance to do so.

The Two-Sentence Summary: Advantages for Students and Instructors Alike

In regularly implementing two-sentence summaries in my class, a science section that discusses a primary scientific literature article each week, I observed four key advantages to this activity:

1)     A memorable main point – Countless studies have demonstrated that students learn better when they are actively involved in their own learning – through writing, discussing, participating in group work, problem-solving, etc. (i.e. “active learning”). When asked to critically evaluate the main point of an assignment rather than passively receiving this information from an instructor, students are more likely to remember the take-home message. 

 

2)     Students settle down to summarize – We must acknowledge that this week’s assignment might not be the first thing on our students’ minds when they enter our classrooms. As such, the brilliance of the authors’ experimental methods to determine the infection mode of the bacterium Listeria might not be their current focus. When students enter my class, I typically display a PowerPoint slide with a two-sentence summary prompt and the location of index cards. Without any additional direction from me, students wind down the pre-class chatter and begin to focus on the task at hand. Over time, I even noticed that some students started arriving a few minutes earlier to have more time to review their materials and compose their summaries before class. Ah, the joy of prepared students!

3)     Concise communication – Research from a wide variety of disciplines is often reported in the mass media, on the nightly news or on NPR, in short sound bites. How do we teach our students to accurately – and concisely – summarize important findings, so that no meaning is lost? Practice. Lots and lots of practice, beginning with when they first encounter the pivotal findings of others in our classrooms. Don’t be surprised if you encounter some resistance to brevity. I have had the pleasure of challenging the ninja-like semi-colon that camouflages superfluous independent clauses.

4)     Inclusivity – What I have loved about two-sentence summaries is the environment of inclusivity it creates at the start of class. Students who have struggled with the intricacies of a reading can check their understanding by focusing on the overarching message. As one of my students commented on a course evaluation, “Participation was handled in a way that everyone could contribute even if the information was difficult to understand.” On the other hand, advanced students who have readily digested the material may be challenged to develop the language skills required to concisely craft their statements. 

The Two-Sentence Summary: Adapting to Your Classroom

If you are considering implementing two-sentence summaries in your classroom, here are some adaptations you might consider:

Why, yes, I have attendance records! – Want to monitor attendance without taking extra time out of your class? Have students write their names on their two-sentence summaries and collect them. Voila! You know who was in class (and who did the reading).

Participation: To Grade or Not to Grade? – You might use the two-sentence summaries as an assessment, assigning point values to their completion and/or quality. In a class I taught in which the lead instructor required participation, I used the index card as the physical “ticket” to their participation grade. The first time that a student participated in a given class, he/she turned in his/her index card to me. At the start of class, everyone wanted to get rid of his or her card! This got the discussion rolling right from the start, and also prevented a handful of students from dominating the discussion. As one of my students wrote on the subsequent course evaluation, “I enjoy how my section leader goes out of her way to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to participate.”

 

Pre- and Post-Assessment – Have you asked your students to summarize a finding at the start of class to gauge their initial understanding (i.e. pre-assessment)? Why not collect these summaries, and have them again summarize the finding at the end of class, or at the end of a unit, to collect real data on the effectiveness of your teaching (i.e. post-assessment)? Has your students’ understanding evolved? For the true over-achieving teachers, present the “before” and “after” snapshots to your students to encourage them to be cognizant of their own learning (i.e. “meta-cognition”).

 

The Two-Sentence Summary: A Two-Sentence Summary 

When emphasizing the main point of an assignment or concept, students may be asked to produce a concise summary of the take-home message in two sentences or less. By providing students with time to independently reflect, your students will be more actively involved in their learning, and in your class! 

Tell us about it! If you have tried out two-sentence summaries in your class, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to comment with your experiences or suggestions on this post. 

 

Empathy and Teaching

TJ Dumansky

In the Innovations blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Kahlenberg asked: “In higher education, should colleges affirmatively seek to teach students empathy or is doing so inappropriate because it is unrelated to academic achievement and might be overtly political?”[1]  His question responds to a study by a team of social psychologists that suggests that empathy among college students is declining.[2]  The two aspects of empathy that the study identifies as exhibiting the greatest decline are “perspective taking” or “the ability to imagine others’ point of view,” and “empathic concern” or the “tendency to feel and respond to others’ emotions.”[3] 

I teach in the Religious Studies department and in the Divinity School at Yale, and so I am often faced with questions about how students’ desire and ability to understand one another’s diverse religious experiences impacts their learning.  However, I think that the importance of empathy extends to any discipline, given that diversity in terms of economics, race, gender and ethnicity impacts learning in any classroom (note the recent press about gender bias and success in the sciences at Yale).[4]  In this post, I’d like to briefly review some strategies for cultivating empathic practices as a teacher and in one’s students.

One of the big reasons that empathy and education is a hot topic is because empathy is understood as a learned habit, something that can develop through training and practice.  Sara Konrath, one of the authors of the study about declining empathy, links the practice of empathy with better learning outcomes:

“Besides the obvious social benefits, research also links empathy in students with better academic outcomes. Just as empathetic doctors and therapists have patients with better outcomes, empathetic instructors get better results from their students, even on objective measures such as multiple-choice tests.”[5]

Two of the techniques that Konrath suggests using in the classroom to develop empathy are role-playing exercises and exposure to highly empathic role models. 

I’d like to highlight three strategies that feature prominently in the YTC teaching workshops that might already implicitly serve as tools to teach empathy, or could be utilized as empathic teaching tools.

Two of these tools relate to the critical first week of the semester: the policy sheet and the student survey.

First, the policy sheet (or syllabus).

The policy sheet is meant to communicate basic information about the section, frame how the section fits into the class, and set the tone for section.  The analogue for the policy sheet if you are a professor and not a TF is the syllabus.  Both policy sheet and syllabus are key opportunities to communicate expectations for classroom dynamics in addition to standards for things like handing in work on time or grading rubrics.  For example, you might articulate standards for discussion that foster more empathic interaction.  Such as:

•   Emphasize listening as a core skill in achieving disciplinary excellence. 
•   Define what counts as respectful, open and safe dialogue.  For example, it starts with something as simple as learning the names of your classmates.  It might also mean interpreting others’ arguments as charitably as possible.
•   Practice asking clarifying and follow-up questions in response to others, rather than jumping to offer your own opinion or solution.

You might also consider offering a brief written rationale for why these behavioral standards matter for student learning.  This rationale itself is a way of asking students to practice empathy by considering their role in impacting their classmates’ learning.

Second, the student survey.

Before or on the first day of class, or section, it is a good idea to survey your students about their prior experience with the subject, their expectations for discussion, and their reasons for enrolling in the class.  This information can help you craft activities and navigate different learning preferences.  A way that this tool can be utilized to cultivate awareness about the importance of empathy in the classroom is to use it to introduce students to the challenges of accommodating diverse intellectual histories, learning preferences, and motivations for taking the course.

For example, if half the class loves small-group work and the other half loathes it, how often should you assign activities that put them in small groups?  Offer this conflicting data to the class and express your understanding of both preferences; follow this up with an acknowledgement of the challenge that this presents for you as the discussion facilitator and tell the students that you will attempt to make this a good learning experience for all of them but that their patience and understanding are part of the equation.  In this moment, you are explicitly asking the students to practice empathy by seeing themselves and their classmates as both learners and co-teachers, and considering how they might better appreciate the learning preferences of other students.

Third, the mid-semester review.

Typically, the mid-semester evaluation gauges your effectiveness as a teacher thus far in the term.  It is a short, anonymous survey of students’ assessment of various exercises and strategies that you have used in class. 

As a way of teaching empathy, include the opportunity for self-reflection in the mid-semester review.  This can be as simple as one or two questions about the students’ work habits and interpersonal interchanges in the class.  The ability to identify their own work habits and responses to classmates can help them better understand the experiences of others. Questions might include:

•  What percentage of the time have you completed the reading?
• Has your understanding of a problem/concept/reading ever been improved by input from a fellow student? When?
•  Do you feel that your views or suggestions are valued during discussion?

The point of these sorts of questions does not have to be an accurate measurement of students’ feelings – it is, rather, to build into the class an opportunity for them to reflect on the types of empathic communication that promote cooperation and improve learning, and to identify modes of communication that instead foster conflict and isolation.  If it turns out that there is consistency in student answers – positively or negatively – it is also instructive for you as the teacher in determining what empathic learning strategies might be working, or falling short. 

An important component of this process is following up after the reviews are submitted.  Here, you as the teacher have a great opportunity to demonstrate practicing empathy in the classroom by summarizing, paraphrasing and expressing appreciation for student responses, and telling them how you will respond to their concerns in concrete ways during the rest of the semester.  This is a moment for the teacher to model understanding of the students’ experience and engage with them in discussion about what might be the deeper concerns that students have about learning.  If time permits, you could also ask the students to give suggestions for how the learning environment could be improved through better communication practices. 

It is also important to articulate for students what empathic habits they are already doing well: if you notice that students are interpreting one another charitably, asking good follow-up questions, or demonstrating appreciation for another person’s preferred learning style, name these habits out loud.  This practice can take place after the mid-semester review, but you can also do it at the end of any class; it takes less than a minute to do.  The more you point out the sorts of specific empathic practices that foster learning, the better chance you have of fostering these habits in students.

It must be noted: defining empathy is not a straightforward task – for example, there are questions about whether it is primarily cognitive or affective, how it might be distinguished from sympathy, and the differences in studying it whether one is a psychologist, neuroscientist, or ethicist.  Here, empathy has been understood as the disposition that enables one to put her- or himself in another’s place, or to be able to understand and share the feelings of another person.  In conclusion, I’d like to reiterate that it is helpful for teachers to view empathy as a practice, as a way to emphasize it as a skill that can be developed (in oneself and in students), and not merely to see it as an emotion that some people naturally possess more than others.  Because it is a practice, teachers can develop concrete strategies to employ in the classroom to increase learning outcomes by fostering empathy.  We’d love to hear about some strategies that you have tried related to empathy and education.

---

[1] “Should We Teach Empathy in College?” August 9, 2011, http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/should-we-teach-empathy-in-college/30044 

[2] Sara H. Konrath, Edward H. O'Brien and Courtney Hsing, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review, published online August 5, 2010, http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/eob/files/konrathetal2011.pdf

[3] Paul Anderson and Sara Konrath, “Why Should We Care?—What to Do About Declining Student Empathy”  July 31, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Should-We-Care-What/128420/

[4] See: http://news.yale.edu/2012/09/24/scientists-not-immune-gender-bias-yale-study-shows and http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/10/22/yale-scientists-probe-gender-gap/

[5] http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Should-We-Care-What/128420/

Using Teaching Tools in a Research Talk

Hi, my name is Ross Boltyanskiy, I am a PhD student in physics and a fellow at the Yale Teaching Center.  This is my first blog post ever!  Here we go...

In a way, I feel like I'm "the teaching guy" in my lab and I am often told that no matter what I do, it sounds like I'm teaching.  Some of you may have had similar experiences.  While normally that's not always a compliment, to my ears it often is.  I think this attitude stems from a desire in teaching enthusiasts to share a bit of knowledge, a bit of understanding, and a bit of appreciation with our audience, whoever the audience is.  I have especially enjoyed incorporating elements of teaching in my research talks.  Here I'll mention a few practices I learned from pedagogy that I think make presentations both more effective and more enjoyable.  What follows are mostly my opinions bolstered by some feedback, not proven theorems!  I will categorize these opinions into four very fundamental concepts we think about when teaching a class.

I. Prior knowledge

This is one of the most important aspects of giving a talk: know your audience!  One may say that the audience in a research talk is just researchers, right?  While true, it's similar to saying that the audience in a class is just students.  We usually appreciate that students are different - they have varying levels of preparation, different interests, and different expectations.  Understanding this is perhaps even more important in preparing to give a talk.  Here are a few aspects of our audience that are particularly important to keep in mind:

(a)  Background & Expertise 
My field is biophysics and I'm always thinking about my audience's mathematical background and area of expertise.  Are they mainly biologists? Are they physicists?  Engineers?  Are they mathematically inclined?  The answer to each of those questions should significantly affect the talk.  Given their area of expertise, what kind of language are they used to?  It might be very different from the language I'm used to in which case I have to work hard to adjust.  I imagine the situation is similar in other sciences, in the humanities, and social sciences although in some cases the differences in audience backgrounds might be more delicate.

(b)  Interests
It is comparably important to think of what piques the curiosity of your audience.  This question might take us back to the previous point of their area of expertise.  However, it's also worth thinking about what brings your audience together at the given meeting - is it a common topic, a common technique, a common approach?  With each group, it's essential to figure out what questions will motivate them.  Sometimes it's tough to acknowledge that those might not be the same questions that motivated you to pursue your project!  That's ok.  Our talks are geared at engaging our audience, so the focus should be on them.

(c)  Goals 
This one I find a bit tricky.  The audience might have an agenda in being present at the meeting. They might be eager to learn about a cutting edge technique, they might want to adapt aspects of your research in their projects, or they might just be there for entertainment.  I think it's important to think about their goals in order to best engage them.  Having said that, we should not sacrifice our goals for theirs.  We should have an agenda as well - perhaps it's getting feedback about our work, perhaps it's getting ideas about future research, or maybe it's spreading the word about our awesomeness.  In any case, our goals should be prioritized and kept in mind.

(d)  Context
The level of formality of the talk is an important knob to adjust. Giving an informal talk at a formal meeting is unprofessional. Giving a formal talk at an informal meeting is often an ineffective way to resonate with the group and get feedback.  Formality is a fun degree of freedom to explore, there is lots of room to play here as long as we are thoughtful about it.

I'm sure there are other relevant categories, but I hope you get the idea.  With this perspective, one should never give two identical talks!  It's more work this way, but it's more effective and much more interesting.   

II.  Active Learning

I remember thinking that active learning is not relevant to talks since talks are most passive lectures.  While talks are mainly lectures (and we may not be able to really change that), they don't have to be passive.  Lecture can be very active and engaging.  Here are a few tips I learned form teaching that I try to adapt to my talks.

(a)  Pausing
This may seem trivial, but please pause in your talk for your listeners to think!  In a class, this is my favorite type of active learning.  It's the easiest, most risk-free one to employ and overall I believe it can make the biggest difference.  When we make an important statement, let's pause for significantly longer than it would take us to internalize the point.  This is not because our typical audience is less intelligent, but because they haven't thought about our point before.  Pausing for longer also allows them to think of the ways the point you made does not make sense thus offering an opportunity to ask questions.  I put "pausing" in the category of active learning because it can force the audience to think, to integrate knowledge, and to look for gaps in understanding.  It gets them engaged.  As a ball-park value I recommend trying to pause for 5-7 seconds.  This may seem short, but it can feel like hours on stage.

(b)  Asking questions... AND pausing
This is my second favorite type of active learning.  Asking question can be an amazing way to both motivate the audience and to channel their thinking.  This practice only belongs in the active learning category, however, if you leave enough time for actual engagement.  Next time when you want to make a strong point in a talk, consider asking the question first, leaving the listener a bit puzzled, perhaps in a contradiction, and leave him/her with a opening that you will soon fill with the answer.  This is often a much more effective way to get the point across. 
Now let me ask you something: suppose you pose a question that has a relatively accessible answer that someone in the audience may know, should you wait for an answer?  I'm pausing here for you to consider this...  Think about it for 5 seconds.  Now comes my answer: I think it very much depends on the context of your talk.  If it's a large research meeting where it's too scary to answer, don't wait for the answer.  In that case, it's enough to leave time for each person to answer the question for himself/herself.  If it's a smaller, less formal meeting, it might make sense to really wait enough time for someone to answer.  This can takes minutes!  Please be ready to persevere the awkwardness that may ensue...

(c)  Soliciting the audience to interpret, analyze, predict, and make suggestions
In a smaller, less formal setting such as group meeting, journal club, or a discussion group, I've had a lot fun trying out different kinds of active learning.  Here I'll mention a few anecdotes of things I've tried that I found effective.  Please consider these merely as examples of ways to experiment.  I made them specific only for illustration purpose.  I do apologize, these examples are exclusively from science, but I think many have accessible analogues in the humanities and social sciences.

• Asking to observe & hypothesize.  For two years I was using a movie of a bacterium interacting with an immune cell as motivation for my talk. After showing the movie, I would explain what I found interesting or unusual about it and what I think a good physical model for the interaction is.  Essentially no one has ever stopped me to mention any other observations or ideas.  Finally, I decided to try something new - I showed the movie and asked members of my group what they thought was happening and what they thought was interesting.  It generated an exhilarating discussion with 7 or 8 ideas of what could be going on and with hypotheses that I never thought about.  They noticed aspects of the movie I never noticed!  It was fascinating.  If you have a provocative, interesting piece of data, I strongly encourage you to ask your audience to analyze it and think about it first.  It will get them engaged and invested in learning about the problem in addition to possibly generating ideas for you.  Your audience will probably not volunteer their analysis right away just because so few people try this in a talk, but eventually ideas should start flowing.

• Asking to brainstorm.  I had a problem of a material failure (cracking) that I could not explain.  I showed the cracks, described the setting under which it was happening and asked my group to help me identify the possible factors that could cause this.  On my own I may have come up with 4 factors, together we came up with maybe 6.  I thought this was very good not only because I got 2 more ideas to try, but also because my group was totally with me when I explained my experiments with regard to the other 4.  Following that discussion, I also asked my group to suggest solutions to this problem. This question didn't produce much during the meeting, but one lab mate followed up with a thought afterwards. At least I knew my group was engaged.

• Asking to analyze.  I was preparing a paper and wanted to present a draft of the abstract and the figures in a small discussion group.  At first I thought I will read the abstract so that the audience knows what the paper is about and then go right to the figures to defend the claims in the abstract. Upon second thought, I decided to ask the group members to read my abstract first and tell me what they think this paper is about.  It worked beautifully.  The group brought up points I intended to be in abstract, points that were misleading as well points that were not emphasized enough.  All of these were both useful for me and prepared the audience for the figures I was about to show.

• Asking to predict.  Several times in different meetings, I have shown a piece of initial data and asked my audience to predict what the rest of the data show (especially data following a perturbation).  I found this useful in a few ways: (a) sometimes they would predict the right outcome which would confirm that it's expect, (b) sometimes they would predict the wrong outcome, often for good reason, which can suggest possible phenomena to be ruled out, (c) sometimes this prompted a question admitting that something earlier on didn't make sense and there is confusion about what to expect. All of these could be very useful.  In all cases, it's essential for the speaker to leave enough time for someone to muster up the courage to say something.  That time is often longer than we would think.

• Asking to interpret.  Once in a while I like to show a full plot and ask my group members what they think this means.  What are the implications?  What could be an underlying mechanism?  Sometimes I do that because I don't know what the answer is.  Sometimes I do it because I want to hear if there are suggestions other than what I thought of.  In any case, I found that it can draw the audience in and can provide useful feedback.

Above are just a few examples in a few categories.  There are so many other ways to try it.  Please experiment!

III.  Diversity of Learners

I'll try to make this section short.  Just as in a class, it's important to be aware that our audience, despite all being researchers even in a narrow field, may pick up information in different ways.  There are many, many ways to characterize learning styles.  Someone should probably write a blog post on that... I'll just mention the simplest, most overused one described here and will point out a few tips I learned about how these apply to talks.

(a)  Visuals 
Clear, simple visuals are a must, at least in science talks.  Cartoons and schematic are extremely helpful!

(b)  Aural/Speech 
Both in lesson plans and in talks, it helps me to memorize basically two things which I'll mention here.  I don't memorize the entire talk although some people do find the need to do that - it depends on the speaker.  I memorize the following:  (1) The introduction: the first two or three sentences are crucial and I tend to think about those a lot.  They should be enticing, they could be bold, could be funny, could be provocative - that too depends much on what the speaker is comfortable with and what the context of the meeting is.  (2) Transitions between points or slides.  Those are essential for a coherent story.  I like transitioning with a question that the next point or slide addresses, that's my preference.

(c)  Read/Write/Text 
Most often I think we err on the side of too much text on our slides, so less wordy is probably my main suggestion (someone must be thinking the same of this blog post...).  Having said that, I strongly encourage having key points written on the slide for those who really pick up by reading and not listening.  I learned a wonderful tip from my adviser to put the main point of the slide or the main question the slide addresses right in the title.  For example a title can look something like: "Protein X misfolding causes disease Y" or "How does the concentration of X affect the dynamics of Y." Short sentences and large font usually work very well. 

(d) Kinesthetic
I'll mention three ideas here: (1) If you bring a toy to your talk, you are already a rock star.  (2) If you bring a toy for everyone in the audience to play with, you are a hero.  A wonderful example of this was a physicist I recently saw give a talk about protein filaments in a cell.  She gave everyone twizzlers to help us discover some properties of twisted filaments.  It was beautiful!  (3) If you have a cool movie, play it and replay it.  Make sure to tell your audience what the movie is showing and it can be a great way to engage and entertain your group.
  
The main point here is that, just as in a class, it's often worthwhile to communicate our ideas in as diverse set of ways as possible.

IV.  Feedback

I'll try to make this section really short.

Getting feedback from research talks is often difficult.  Sometime we can gauge at how the audience interacts with us and what they are doing as we speak, but those cues I find harder to pick up on in a talk than in a class.  Sometimes being sensitive to what questions people ask can point to a focus of the talk that we either intended or did not intend to have.  To get more of those I encourage my audience to ask questions, give comments, and provide suggestions from the very start. 

If you don't get explicit feedback, I'd ask for it.  I often ask my lab mates, friends, and mentors to tell me what they thought the talk did well and push them to tell me how it could be better.  Tell them ahead of time that you are interested in feedback and ask them to observe your talk.  I'm lucky to have a very helpful group and adviser who often give great feedback in practice talks too.  Try to give a practice talk if you can and try to do it as early as possible.  I'm always impressed with the number revision I end up making after practicing...

Being on the topic of getting feedback, I want to encourage everyone to give (especially positive) feedback to the speaker.  If you find the speaker did something well, let him or her know!  It makes a world of difference especially for those of us who are still learning how to give a good talk.

In summary:

I.       Learn as much as you can about your audience before your talk.
II.      Try to engage your audience's thinking as much as possible.
III.     Keep in mind the diversity of your group and try to reach as many of the members as you can.
IV.     Find out if the things you tried in your talk were effective!


Final comment: This may be a bit off topic, but I want to make a suggestion about public speaking.  I am certainly no master at this, but I came across an interesting method I'm experimenting with.  I always get a rush of excitement that often comes along with fear before delivering a talk or teaching a class.  I'd like to keep the excitement but lose the fear.  One tip I learned (interestingly, from an ancient Jewish source) is thinking about helping your audience or your students right before you start.  Our anxiety often comes from being too focused on ourselves, too self-centered, too self-conscious.   Instead, try thinking about giving your audience a chance to learn something cool, appreciate something new, find out something useful.  Focusing on giving to them can be very inspiring.  Give it a try!

I hope this post is helpful in building bridges between teaching and giving talks.  I think there is naturally so much in common between the two.  If you agree or disagree with anything I wrote, please comment!  I'd love to hear your thoughts and I would love to have a chance to learn from you.  Thank you!