“Lecturing is not simply a matter of standing in front of a class and reciting what you know. The classroom lecture is a special form of communication in which voice, gesture, movement, facial expression, and eye contact can either complement or detract from the content. No matter what your topic, your delivery and manner of speaking immeasurably influence your students’ attentiveness and learning.”

The above quote is from “Delivering a Lecture,” a chapter in Barbara Gross Davis’ classic text Tools for Teaching. That chapter is an excellent resource for learning how to lecture well. See also Davis’ chapter, “Preparing to Teach the Large Lecture Course.”

When planning a lecture, keep in mind that you have control or influence over several elements of your classroom.

Do you feel guilty when you lecture? Perhaps you’re afraid that you’re shortchanging students. That, instead, you should be flipping your classroom and getting “active” through group exercises. But really, aren’t there times when you just want to tell your students what they need to know?

Fear no more. Claire Major is here to tell you that lecturing is fine. In fact, it’s often crucial to a successful class. The key, says Major, a professor of higher education administration at the University of Alabama, is to make it interactive.

Have you ever looked out across your students only to find them staring at their computers or smartphones rather than listening attentively to you? Have you ever wondered what you could do to encourage students to resist distractions and focus on the information you are presenting? Have you ever wished you could help students become active learners as they listen to you lecture?

Interactive Lecturing is designed to help faculty members more effectively lecture. This practical resource addresses such pertinent questions as, “How can lecture presentations be more engaging?” “How can we help students learn actively during lecture instead of just sitting and passively listening the entire time?” Renowned authors Elizabeth F. Barkley and Claire H. Major provide practical tips on creating and delivering engaging lectures as well as concrete techniques to help teachers ensure students are active and fully engaged participants in the learning process before, during, and after lecture presentations.

Research shows that most college faculty still rely predominantly on traditional lectures as their preferred teaching technique. However, research also underscores the fact that more students fail lecture-based courses than classes with active learning components. Interactive Lecturing combines engaging presentation tips with active learning techniques specifically chosen to help students learn as they listen to a lecture. It is a proven teaching and learning strategy that can be readily incorporated into every teacher’s methods.

In addition to providing a synthesis of relevant, contemporary research and theory on lecturing as it relates to teaching and learning, this book features 53 tips on how to deliver engaging presentations and 32 techniques you can assign students to do to support their learning during your lecture. The tips and techniques can be used across instructional methods and academic disciplines both onsite (including small lectures and large lecture halls) as well as in online courses.

Traditional lecture is, once again, out of style. There’s evidence that lecture has been a multimedia, somewhat interactive process since the early modern period, and today, many instructors are again attempting to bring more active learning into the lecture hall. Instructors like Kelly Hogan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are committed not simply to more active learning in lecture but also to more inclusive learning. Hogan uses guided reading questions and outlines with fill-in-the blanks for lecture and conducts real-time digital polling. Similarly, University of Alabama professor Claire Major uses three kinds of techniques -- which she calls bookends, overlays and interleaves -- to do what she calls interactive lecture.

What we think might allow these more interactive lectures to be even more effective is for lecturers to take advantage of the other professional teachers in the lecture hall: the teaching assistants.