by Karon Rilling

The Lilly Conference at the start of 2017 had been a productive experience for me. I had gained strategies and, more importantly, I gained a sense of being part of a community of learners/teachers dedicated to effective instruction. When granted the opportunity to attend the Lilly Conference a second time, January 2018, I knew I would gain from the experience.

This year what I took from the conference was some clarity about the lecture portion of instruction. The first plenary presenter, Dr. Elizabeth Barkley, a Music History professor at Foothill College in California spoke on “Terms of Engagement,” in which she addressed the appropriate role of lecture in college classrooms. A subtext of her remarks was that professors shape and direct the energy and attention of the class through words. Essentially, the professor links the students to the content through his or her insights, curiosity, and scholarly glee. The professor’s words guide the students to see the relevance of the content to their lives, their academic growth, and their academic goals.

Clearly, teaching is not just standing up and saying what we know aloud. It is far more intentional and structured. First, Dr. Barker referenced Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. Vygotsky suggests we look at instruction as beginning from what students already understand and have the skills to do and moving students to sequentially more complex knowledge and to more advanced skills. When the teaching is aimed below the zone, students are bored and gain little from the instruction. When the teaching is aimed above the zone, students are frustrated and gain little from the instruction. The complexity for instructors is that the students are in different zones. How are we to manage and mitigate the discrepancy between what some students understand and others do not?

Dr. Barker juxtaposed a brief discussion of cognitive load theory to the description of Vygotsky’s zone. I feel some certainty that everyone reading this has personal experience with cognitive overload. It seems it is a built in factor of attaining an advanced degree. That being said, the importance of cognitive load theory to instruction is the available mental effort. Intrinsic load is the demand on the student by the level of difficulty of the content while extraneous load lessens the student’s available mental effort as distractions or overly wordy, overly complex explanations. What is left is the germane load for processing new information.

Several strategies help students find the zone and process new information. One instructional strategy is “I do. We do. You do,” where instructors demonstrate, then guide, then monitor student work. Another strategy is to stop and have students explain to one another in pairs what was just explained. In addition, instructors can focus attention with a statement like “Give me your eyes and ears. Here comes the essential part” or “Now Hear This.” Finally, choral response, where the class states an essential concept together can focus attention for germane processing.