Dear Angie

Hello, everyone. I hope the summer has been a time of rest and reflection for you, a time to enjoy the wonderful weather, beautiful gardens, and your family. With the approach of fall comes a new group of students and a new slate of classes to teach. Below are answers to a couple of questions that might entice you to try something new with your lectures or with grading in-class participation.

Dear Angie:

I am a new instructor, starting this fall, and I am planning my courses this summer. Do you have any tips on how to make my lectures interesting and helpful for students? Eager in Edmonton

Dear Eager:

I don’t want to discourage you, but I think you should know the following facts (excerpted from Meyers and Jones, Promoting Active Learning, 1993):

• While teachers are lecturing, students are not attending to what is being said 40% of the time

• In the first 10 minutes of lecture, students retain 70% of the information; in the last 10 minutes, they retain only 20%.

• Four months after taking an introductory psychology course, students knew only 8% more than a control group who had never taken the course.

Your desire to make your lectures interesting and helpful for students is commendable, given these statistics! Some tips as you prepare and deliver your lecture include:

• Know your stuff inside and out.

• Be organized, concise, and relevant.

• Have clear learning goals for the course and for each class meeting.

• Incorporate a variety of teaching strategies (discussed further below).

• Be enthusiastic about the subject and about teaching.

• Be sensitive to students’ progress — do not charge ahead for the sake of keeping to the outline if it is clear that students do not understand.

Some teaching strategies used successfully by master teachers include:

• After making a very important point, ask each student to write it down in his or her own words (give them a few minutes); then choose one student to read out what he or she wrote.

This strategy works because writing clarifies thinking, and pausing allows thoughts to be processed before new information is received.

• At the end of the lecture, ask students to write down the most important thing they remember from the day’s lecture, and then ask a few students to read these out loud.

• At the beginning of the next day’s lecture, ask other students to read out what they wrote as the most important thing from the previous day’s lecture.

Both of these strategies force students to pause, write, and reflect on what they are learning, which helps increases retention and understanding.

• Split the lecture into sections and at the end of each section ask students to form pairs and take turns explaining to each other the concepts learned. After three or four minutes, ask if there are any questions.

You will find students do not know they have questions until they try to explain or paraphrase the concept. As they struggle to explain themselves, they uncover areas that they did not understand or consider in sufficient depth.

• Use the “model note-taker technique”, where one student takes notes on the overhead projector at the front of the room while you lecture and others can observe the process of taking notes. Rotate the note-taker every lecture so that each student has a turn to demonstrate his or her note-taking expertise.

If you have any suggestions for making lectures more interesting and effective, be sure to send them to admin@caaa.ca.

Dear Angie:

I find that my colleagues often mean different things when they refer to “critical-thinking skills”, yet we all consider it important that our course develop these skills! What are your thoughts on the subject? Befuddled in Barrie

Dear Befuddled:

You and your colleagues are not alone; it seems that everyone these days is concerned about developing critical-thinking skills. And yes, there are many definitions that can be cited, as documented by Baril et al. (1998). One of the best definitions I have found, by Kurfiss (1988), as follows:

“[Critical thinking is] an investigation whose purpose is to explore a situation, phenomenon, question, or problem to arrive at a hypothesis or conclusion about it that integrates all available information and that can therefore be convincingly justified.”

Wolcott and Lynch (2002) summarize the term as follows:

“Critical thinking is a process of adequately addressing open-ended problems.”

To ensure that your course includes critical thinking, it is important to include open-ended problems with incomplete information, and then provide students with a process by which they can solve the problem. A common template used in many business schools includes the following steps:

1. identify the problem, relevant information, and uncertainties

2. interpret and organize information, and define assumptions

3. list and prioritize alternatives based on a thorough analysis

4. conclude and implement conclusions

5. monitor and provide feedback.

References

Baril, C. P., B. M. Cunningham, D. R. Fordham, R. L. Gardner, Sk. K. Wolcott. 1998. Critical thinking in the public accounting profession: Aptitudes and attitudes. Journal of Accounting Education 16 (3/4): 381–406.

Kurfiss, J. G. 1988. Critical Thinking: Theory, Research, Practice and Possibilities. ASHE_ERIC Higher Education Report No. 2. Washington, D.C: Association for the Study of Higher Education.

Meyers, C., and T. B. Jones. 1993. Promoting active learning: Strategies for the college classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Wolcott, S.K. and Lynch, C. L. 2002. Critical thinking skills toolkit – Part of a Series Developed for Academic Partners by the American Accounting Association

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