by – Kelly Stockstad

When students hear the word “lecture,” they may think of a professor going on and on (and on and on and on) about something they’re not interested in for the entire class meeting. At the Lilly Conference in January 2018, I heard three presenters discuss how to create engaging lectures – something that students may consider an oxymoron. However, we don’t need to change our entire lecture or discussion strategy to affect student learning. Rather, we can add reflection time to classes to add maximum impact to student learning.

Christine Harrington and Todd Zakrajsek write in their book, Dynamic Lecturing, “one of the most powerful ways we can improve how we lecture is to build in time for reflection during the class period” (97). If you’re like me, you may feel like you are already rushing to get through the material for each class meeting. You may also wonder what you need to cut to fit in this reflection time. I’ll share with you two quick, easy-to-use strategies that don’t take much time at all.

The first strategy is the one-minute paper. This technique is exactly what it sounds like. Students get one minute to write a paper based on a prompt. The most common writing prompts are the big take-away from the day’s lecture or the concept that need more explanation (a.k.a. the muddiest point). Alternatively, this prompt may ask students to provide an example of a concept that was discussed that day or to make connections between concepts covered that day and concepts covered previously. My favorite suggestion from Harrington and Zakrajsek is the prompt, “A classmate contacts you because he or she was unable to attend class today. What were the big ideas from today’s lecture that you would share with your classmate?” (107). I like this question because, in addition to providing a check that students understood the big ideas, it subtly reminds students to contact one another for lecture notes.

The second strategy is called think, pair, share. This technique has students first think or write about an answer to a prompt. I like to have students jot down notes, so they don’t forget the points they want to make. The second step in this technique is to have students create pairs to discuss their answers to the prompt one-on-one. Finally, students share answers with the entire class. You may choose to take volunteers or call on specific students. A variation on this exercise is think, pair, square. Instead of sharing with the entire class, two pairs of students form a group of four, or a square, to discuss the prompt. Discussing in small groups may be beneficial for students who are reticent to speak in front of the class (Harrington and Zakrajsek 107). I have used a further variation, think-pair-square-share, which moves from the group of four to a full-class discussion. I found that this technique was very effective to get a whole-class discussion started in a class where my questions to the whole class were met with silence. The time you need for this technique could be as little as two minutes – giving students 30 seconds to think, 30 seconds each to share (1 minute total), and 30 seconds to hear one or two responses. You can, of course, add more time as you want. I recommend keeping the think portion to less than one minute because students want to jump to the share portion right away. The pair portion works well with 2-5 minutes, with each member of the pair getting half of the time. The square portion, if used, should be at least double the amount of the share portion. You make the share portion as short or as long as you would like.

One or two minutes of time is all you need to add reflection practices into your class meeting. Giving your students a chance to reflect on the material they’ve learned increases their mastery of that material.