The Office of Academic Performance at Habib

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We hope you have a smooth end to a wonderful semester! The Office of Academic Performance will continue regular postings at the start of the summer 2016 semester.

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PLANNING LECTURES - DESIGN A CATCHY INTRODUCTION - Launch into your lecture with a catchy start or one that somehow involves your students.  Try one of these opening strategies: - Try a brief interactive exercise that asks students to pair with a partner for two minutes. - Share a story or anecdote related to the lecture content. - Begin with a demonstration that will show students what they will be able to do by the end of the lecture. - Relate lecture content to previous class material, homework, or current events. - Ask students to spend two or three minutes writing about the readings, concepts, or issues to be examined during lecture. Then ask a few students to share. - Raise a provocative question that will be answered during the lecture. - Ask them to discuss it with a partner, write about it, or respond to it verbally. - Open with a three-minute Q&A session. Turn to the textbook or simply ask a question that will lead into that day's lecture topic.

http://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/designing-smart-lectures/planning-lectures

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PLANNING LECTURES - Develop an introduction, body, and conclusion to your lecture to meet your goals and to help your students follow your thoughts. Establish a catchy introduction, a focused body that examines just a few major ideas, and a resounding conclusion that connects and brings closure to the issues raised.  Organize your content into these basic categories. Begin your lecture with general concepts, then move to specific ideas and theories that build on or explicate those concepts. To avoid merely describing concepts without practical application or context, prepare examples to demonstrate them in practice. Return to your goals again and again: will your practical demonstrations, applications, models, or examples help your students leave the room knowing what you want them to know?

http://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/designing-smart-lectures/planning-lectures

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PLANNING LECTURES - Organize your lecture material in logical order: Cause-Effect: Events are cited and explained (i.e., one can demonstrate how the continental revolutionary movements of the late 1700's affected British politics at the turn of the century). Time sequential: Lecture ideas are arranged chronologically (i.e., a lecturer explaining the steps in a clinical supervision model talks about the first step to be undertaken, the second step, and so forth). Topical (Compare and Contrast): Related elements of various selected topics are focused on successively (i.e., a professor lecturing about etiologies, typical histories, and predisposing factors of various diseases). Problem-Solution: The statement of a problem is followed by alternate solutions (i.e., a lecture on the Cuban missile crisis could begin with a statement of the foreign policy problem followed by a presentation of the alternative solutions available to President). Pro-Con: A two-sided discussion of a given topic is presented (i.e., the lecture is organized around the advantages and disadvantages of using the lecture method of instruction). Ascending-Descending: Lecture topics are arranged according to their importance, familiarity, or complexity (i.e., in a lecture introducing students to animal diseases, the diseases of primary importance could be discussed first, the tertiary/less important ones last).

http://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/designing-smart-lectures/planning-lectures

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LECTURE CONTENT: What Are You Trying to Say? Articulate the goals for every lecture to yourself, and plan to share those goals with your students at the beginning of your presentation. If you cannot identify your own lecture's objectives, neither will your students.  Clarify the particular goals of each day's presentation by listing them to yourself early in your planning process. Then, plan to share that list (or a modified version of it) with your students before beginning your lecture. Determine which key points can be effectively developed during the class session. It is necessary to strike a balance between depth and breadth of coverage. Given too many details, students lose sight of the main ideas. Or, when too many ideas are presented and not developed, students fail to gain understanding.

http://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/designing-smart-lectures/planning-lectures

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LECTURES - Good Lecturers

Enthusiasm, organization, communication, focus – these are qualities of good lecturers.

Good lecturers learn how to focus students' attention to help them identify and remember central points of the lecture. Considering rhetorical strategies such as context, audience, visual resources, and material demonstration (e.g., gestures, movement, tone of voice) in designing their lecture content and presentation, good lecturers organize lecture periods into smaller units and incorporate break-out activities to counter student passivity and foster critical thinking and problem solving. They provide materials such as study guides, sample test questions, lecture outlines or even lecture notes, slides, or overheads to complement their lecture. After all, students might hear your information, but they only process that information by working with it. Above all, good lecturers understand that the lecture format provides an opportunity to share enthusiasm for a scholarly topic.

Source: http://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/designing-smart-lectures

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LECTURES - Good Lectures

Organization, dialogue, grounding toward critical thinking – these are qualities of good lectures.

Good lectures convey new terms and concepts, delineate historical context, demonstrate function, and draw complex connections between ideas. Well-organized, vibrant lectures offer efficient ways to explain important detail to large groups of diverse learners. Far from one-way monologues that serve as "information dumps" from teacher to student, good lectures ground students in a topic and include activities to motivate their critical thinking about that topic. In fact, a good lecture can model critical thinking for students when "a teacher questions her own assumptions, acknowledges ethical dilemmas hidden in her position, refers to inconvenient theories, facts, and philosophies that she has deliberately overlooked, and demonstrates an openness to alternative viewpoints" (Brookfield, 1995).

Source: http://cei.umn.edu/support-services/tutorials/designing-smart-lectures

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CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT - Anticipating Challenges

Spend some time before classes begin anticipating how you will manage common teaching challenges. Below are some examples of issues you may want to consider. 

Deciding On Your Classroom Management Style  - Set procedures  - Set expectations  - Think about your limits  - Talk to trusted colleagues about their approach - What will you do if expectations are not met?  - Or limits exceeded? 

Can you think of anything else?

Source: http://teaching.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/CTSI-Tip-Sheet-Template.pdf-1.pdf

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ORGANIZATION TIP - Organize Papers in a Snap

Are you spending hours putting student work in alphabetical order? Having a hard time entering student data quickly into your grade book? Assign each student in your class a number based on their place alphabetically in the class. Ask the students to write their alphabetical order number in the upper right hand corner of each paper they hand it to you. You can then simply place the papers in number order in seconds. You can add their scores to your grade book or spreadsheet more quickly.

Source: http://teachingtipsandtricks.tumblr.com/

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TEACHING STRATEGY - Active Learning

Active Learning is anything that students do in a classroom other than merely passively listening to an instructor's lecture. Research shows that active learning improves students' understanding and retention of information and can be very effective in developing higher order cognitive skills such as problem solving and critical thinking.  The site below will help you create and plan active learning activities in your course.

More information: http://pedagogy.merlot.org/ActiveLearning.html