A Compendium of
Learning and Teaching Strategies for College
Faculty/Instructor Pathway
Lectures and Online Content
Provide well organized lectures and online content. Before each lecture, remind students what has been covered prior to the lecture and what will follow in the next lecture. For each lecture or 'written' (online) lecture, provide an initial overview of what the lecture covers and for each part of the lecture, highlight key terms. At the end of the lecture or online content, review what you have just covered.
It is generally considered best practice to use overheads and slides, diagrams, and other visual representations of the main ideas in your lectures. According to Gerry Everding,
"Providing students with illustrative diagrams showing relationships among key concepts to be discussed in a lecture can boost student learning and recall, especially for students who have difficulty organizing bits and pieces of related information into a cohesive mental framework.... "
As you speak with students, become aware of your use of figurataive language, i.e. idioms, metaphors and similes. For example, you might say, "after Shirley received her grade on the test, she was on cloud nine." Or you might say, "In this story, Tom wears his heart on his sleeve." For some students with learning difficulties and for many ESL students, such figurative llanguage can be difficult to understand. When you notice yourself using such figurative language consider following it with a more explicit statement. "Shirley was on cloud nine. She was very happy!" You can find more examples of figurative language here and here.
Similarly, if you occasionally use highfalutin (case in point) words during a lecture (e.g., noir, defenestration, turgid ), you might want to follow these by saying the same thing in other words, or by defining the less common word.