Giving a lecture: the pre-op

I am giving  a lecture this week. This will be my first lecture; I have been thinking about it for weeks now, and fiddling daily with my outline. The professor for whom I am lecturing suggested that I create an outline with main points, and then elaborate/digress on them as needed; however, I don’t think this is the best strategy for a first-time lecturer.

I have a deep fear of barfing in front of the 200ish students that I will be lecturing to. I have written a point-driven outline, and now am in the process of adding meat to those bones–sentences, prose, bolding and underlining to help me survive the almost-inevitable brain fart. Basically, I will be reading aloud to them, which as a student I have always found interesting and useful, provided that the lecture was interesting, the lecturer confident, and the material relevant.

I don’t anticipate being a robot in doing this sort of reading; I sort of imagine this written-out lecture as a kind of a script, and it’s my job to make it lively and to make not SOUND like I’m reading off the page.

I also have powerpoint slides with photographs and quotes which I would like to discuss with the class–this will be more free form, more ad-libby. The slides will not have bullet point type summaries of my lecture. I generally think that this makes students copy down the powerpoint rather than listen to what is actually being said by the lecturer. As soon as they finish copying the slide, they sit back and their eyes glaze over.

I suppose that the read-aloud type lecturing is not ideal, but again, as a first time lecturer my goal is not to dazzle them with the intricate workings of my thought process, but to get through the material in an organized and clear fashion. I think the clever and imaginative digressions can come later in my career.

While searching for resources about lecturing, I came across this video. This is a lecture given by an MIT professor at Harvard (it looks to be the ’80s or early ’90s) about how to lecture. There were four major points–his “big four”–that I found especially useful:

1. Cycle: that is, repeat and re-emphasize your point. Apparently, about 20% of your audience is listening at any given time, so if you do this several times, you’re more likely to get it across.
2. Verbal punctuation: tell the audience where you have gone in the lecture, where you are going. Numbering of points: first, second, third, etc.  I’m not sure if this is included under the category of verbal punctuation, but pausing seems especially important as well (it seems like inexperienced lecturers tend to speed up on stage. It’s kind of like relativity).
3. Near miss: to discuss what is close, but incorrect (I think). This seems more applicable to teachers of science and math; it’s a little bit more difficult to so clearly identify what is “close but not it” in history, methinks.
4. Rhetorical questions: make them frequent and answerable.

Other pieces of advice he gave: begin with a promise, end with the delivering on that promise. No jokes at the beginning of a lecture. Don’t thank your audience. Watch your body language. Etc. Again, it seems geared towards teachers of more concrete subjects, but I think that much of this would be useful for lecturers in all fields. Plus, I think you get to see famed historian of British history, Mark Kishlansky! Cool!

Post-mortem to come later this week.