Broken Lectures
My tendency to let lecture bleed into discussions. It often happens after about fifteen minutes when I see students' eyes start to haze over. As I'm not too smart, it never occurred to me that it was natural attention span and not bad delivery on my part. Great strategy, the Mini-Lecture!!!
Hi Christopher,
Thank you for the kind words about the course contents and structure. In response to your question about when to use problem-solving in the day's planning I would suggest that you use it throughout the class period.
Introduce a concept with your mini-lecture and then have the students take a few minutes to practice what has just been covered. Move to the next concept and repeat the procedure. At the end of the day you can devote some work time to problem-solve all the concepts integrated together. So your day will be stair stepped through the material with content, practice, content, practice and the integration with the problem-solving. This will help the student store the new information in their working memory since they will have used and applied the new information several times.
Gary
I've noticed this while just taking this course! Fifteen minutes is about all you can do without needing a "Thinking Break." At first, I didn't think that I needed these breaks, but now I see that I am more effective in remembering the material (and actually progress through faster) when I take these short breaks. Learning about teaching provides some interesting opportunities for observing the learning process in yourself.
Mini-lectures are an excellent idea. I really think this will enable me to cover all of the information needed in this course while keeping the students attention (and my energy high). While the problem-solving method is said to be for advanced students, I don't see how else the students can actually learn abstract mathematical concepts except by doing the problems (maybe this is my own learning style surfacing?). In mathematics/physics, problem-solving is crucial for getting a grasp on the topic. Is it best to put problem-solving (i.e. giving students problems to work on the whiteboard) at the end of the day?
That is exactly why mini-lectures are important: they recycle attention spans AND also target different learning styles for different students. If I were a student that would be my preferred learnin style.
I definately need to try mini-lectures. I have trained myself to have 4 hour attention spans...I forgot that most of us like more brief periods of attention.
Absolutely. I do this as well when I instruct residentially. It is especially helpful with night classes (that are four hours or more in length). I also like to add a small group presentation toward the end so students can pull everything together from lecture, project work, and small group discussion.
Hi Arron,
You are right on with your analysis of how to effectively reach students. The variety holds interest as well as appealing to the learning styles of the student. Keep up the good work.
Gary
Breaking up lectures into smaller segments and incorporating other methods such as demonstrations or a hands-on student activity works well for recycling my students' attention spans. This also helps to trigger different student learning styles so hopefully students might retain information and skills a little better than if I just lectured.
