Skip to main content

Revamping the Lecture

Lecturing has a bad name in today's world of experiential learning, but it's an often necessary component to legal research classes as students have to have some bibliographic information before we jump into the databases. As I conclude one semester and begin prepping for the next, I've been doing a lot of reading on how I can make my lectures more effective and engaging learning experiences for my students.

As Todd Zakrajsek notes in his 2017 Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on Dynamic Lecturing, "You can't just take bad examples of something and claim that the whole concept is bad." Instead, we should focus on what makes a lecture compelling for our students in our course planning and evaluate our lectures after our classes for their efficacy, reflecting on what worked well and what didn't.

So how can we make the most of our lectures?  Here's a few ideas I've come across:
  1. Make your objectives clear to your students. Don't hide the ball--let your class know the goals of this lecture, what they should know when you're finished, and why that's important to the overarching goals of the class.
  2. Engage students from the start of the lecture. Use storytelling to humanize what you're teaching. Legal research may not be the most exciting subject matter for all our students, but if you can tie statutory research to a story from practice or citators to an instance where someone was embarrassed in court for not finding an authority (think Marcia Clarke and Judge Ito). Social media can also be fantastic for examples to share with your class. #LawTwitter, #AppellateTwitter, and #PracticeTuesday often bring up examples of attorneys sharing stories from their experiences in practice.
  3. Vary your presentation methods. Powerpoint is easy for many of us because we're used to it, but don't default to it just because it's familiar. (I'm often guilty of this as I try to juggle all of my administrative library responsibilities with all of my tenure requirements--there's never enough time. Join me in my pledge to use less PowerPoint next semester--try a new format for at least one lecture.) Consider what formats might work best for the topic you're presenting--your students will appreciate it and it'll freshen things up for you. 
  4. Check in with your audience effectively. Be in touch with your audience and their experience.  Rather than asking if there are any questions at the end of the lecture to see if the class is still with you, intersperse your lecture with more effective questions for the class: "What parts of this are still a little confusing for you?" Even asking "What questions do you have?" instead of "Do you have any questions?" can lead to more queries from your class. Toward the end of class, try a "minute paper" assessment: ask students to respond in one or two sentences to a question, such as "What stood out to you as the most important concept in today's lecture?" or "What are you confused about?" Spend a few minutes reviewing the responses and you'll learn a lot about how your students are learning.
  5. Use appealing handouts as a visual aid and a tool for students to follow your lecture. This past semester, we started using guided notes handouts in our first year legal research workshops, which allowed students to fill in key information as they listen. They liked them as a tool to stay on track with the presentation and ensure they were walking with the most pertinent information. We thought this might help them listen more carefully to the lecture, but instead they focused on filling in the worksheets from the Powerpoint (maybe I should just get rid of the Powerpoint). If you're going to go the guided notes route, make sure you include points to be filled out based on what you're saying, not providing all the information they need on the board/screen.
  6. Keep them short! Most topics we're teaching in legal research can be taught quickly. The history of Shepard's in print might be interesting to us, but your students do not care. Their attention span is less than 15 minutes, so you should not be talking for longer than that. They want to know only what they practically need to know to conduct legal research and analysis. Hit the key points and transition to the active learning component where they put those skills to the test. Consider the "change up" method, which advises that you split the class up with that attention span in mind. In a class of 50 minutes, you should change up the lesson at least twice, moving to a different type of learning.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the new
Read more

Motivation in the Legal Research Classroom

Motivating students in the legal research classroom can be a challenge. As we know, there are many false narratives surrounding students' conceptions of legal research's importance, interest level, and ease, all of which can result in a decrease in students' motivation to engage in this subject matter. There are two types of motivation--intrinsic and extrinsic.  Extrinsic motivation occurs when students are motivated by an outside reward or punishment;[1] in instruction, this is often the grades students will get on research assignments or the participation points they might receive for actively engaging with in-class exercises.  Intrinsic motivation , on the other hand, occurs when students are interested in the topic for its own sake.[2] Due to legal research's false narratives, students entering our classrooms tend to be drive primarily by extrinsic motivation.  The problem is, as Julie Dirksen aptly notes in her excellent book Design for How People Learn , &qu
Read more

Helping with Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 2: Prioritizing Transparency

One factor leading to decreased focus and motivation in online classes is the uncertainty many students feel in the virtual environment.  This uncertainty can arise from students never having taken an online class before, from having distractions at home that they don't have in their in-person classes, or from using technology with which they're not familiar.  This uncertainty can lead to students disengaging with the class, as they feel disconnected from the content, their instructor, and their classmates. To support students undergoing this uncertainty and help them stay engaged, provide as much clarity as possible.  Being clear about expectations will help students gain some balance in an uncomfortable situation.  There are a number of ways we can help students minimize their discomfort--from making sure online class modules are standardized in their format within the learning management system to designing a syllabus with well-structured, clear course requirements.  One m
Read more

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki
Read more

Cognitive (Over)Load in First Year Legal Research Instruction

The research and analysis that we teach our students are processes, but when our students’ grades are based primarily on the documents they produce, students can have a difficult time internalizing those processes. This is partially due to what cognitive psychologists refer to as cognitive load.   Cognitive psychologists define cognitive load as “the mental burden that managing working memory imposes on a person.” [1]   According to a 2015 law review article on cognitive load and legal writing: "Cognitive load theorists opine that the process of learning complex new information can exhaust a student’s finite working memory, perhaps capable of holding as few as two or three elements at a time. The complexity of the ‘element interactivity’—the interaction between various elements of the material to be learned—alters cognitive load. Thus, the complicated process of analyzing legal problems, researching their possible solutions, and communicating that analysis in writing can o
Read more