HOW TO GIVE INTERACTIVE LECTURE

Giving interactive lectures involves delivering effective lectures, organizing the class period and selecting student activities, managing the class, and collecting feedback on what the students have learned. Making lectures interactive involves giving students, all of them, something to do during the lecture - answering a question, interpreting a graph, or solving a problem - and continuing such activities regularly throughout the term. For example, you might begin a unit on faults by showing the image linked to the thumbnail to the left. Rather than telling the students that the image is an example of a fault, you could first ask the students to make observations and discuss their interpretation with a neighbor. Then, call on a few students to present their interpretation and discuss the responses with the class.

CONTENT
As with many active-learning techniques, interactive lectures may take
longer to cover any given topic than non-interactive ones. Mazur (1997)
recommends that the lecturer save time by only going over more
difficult and important material rather than duplicating the coverage
of the textbook. Given that it is important in his classes that
students actually do the reading, he gives frequent reading quizzes.

THE MAJOR PART OF INTERACTIVE LECTURE
An interactive lecture will include segments of lecture combined with
segments where students are interacting with each other and the
instructor. All of the activities used to make lectures interactive
involve a learning curve for both instructors and students. For
example, think-pair-share requires students to marshal their thoughts,
present them clearly and succinctly, and synthesize their ideas with
their partners. Instructors must learn how to develop good questions,
analyze the student responses, and incorporate that information into
the following lecture or lecture segment.

MANAGING THE CLASS
* Accept that your class will be noisy when students
are discussing their work. * Visit a few groups and make sure that they are on track. * Find
an effective way to bring the class back together. Some instructors
flick the lights on and off. Some raise their hand, after explaining
that when students see a raised hand, they should raise their hand,
finish their sentence, and stop talking. * Pick groups to report at
random or have all groups report, depending on class size. The latter
is helpful when each group has something different to say (for example,
if each group is looking at a different aspect of a problem). It may be
useful to have each group designate a spokesperson to speak for the
group. * Have each student write their response on a handout of the
activity or a blank sheet of paper, have them write a short paper on an
index card summarizing their group's findings and turn it in for a
grade. * For discussion or other group activities, it's often a good
idea to ask open-ended questions with no single correct answer, because
these are likely to provoke thought and encourage student
participation.

RESPOND TO THE RESPONSES
One of the challenges of interactive lecturing is dealing with
incorrect answers. Either the students don't understand, or you haven't
explained it properly, or it's a very difficult topic. At least with an
interactive lecture, you can address the situation before an exam.
Deal carefully with wrong answers. When many students have a
misunderstanding it is important to address it in class and to consider
how you might present material differently the next time you teach the
course.

RESEARCH ON LEARNING
Hake, 1998 compared pre- and post-course test results for 6000 students
from high school and university physics courses, and found
significantly more improvement in students in courses that used
interactive-engagement methods (including classes over 100 students)
than in those that did not.
Classes that don't use interactive-engagement methods still allow
students to ask questions and still involve asking individual students
questions. Why isn't that enough? The problem is that they involve only
one student at a time (often a small set of students over and over
again) and that students rarely ask questions in class (Graesser and
Person, 1994 ). Passive students will not check to see if they do
understand the material. GBR RESEARCH
Wenzel, 1999 reviewed research on college lectures and reported that
the longer the lecture, the less of the material ended up in the
students' notes (see figure linked to the thumbnail at the left).
Interactive classes commonly involve breaking up the lecture,
effectively giving multiple short lectures, presumably with a higher
percentage of material being retained from each. He also reported that
a class that used a think-pair-share technique for two-three minutes
for every 12-18 minutes of lecture remembered more of the lecture
material directly after the class and twelve days later than the
control class that heard the same lecture without the think-pair-share
breaks.

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