Lecturing is probably the most common form of organized instruction in the world. For many of us, the notions of college teaching and lecturing are so closely aligned that we automatically think of the latter when we think of the former. Indeed, many universities officially designate certain faculty appointments as Lecturer. That lecturing is so common does not, however, make it necessarily the best method of instruction nor does it mean that it is not amenable to the best features of other instructional styles – even singing!

Six preliminary points

Before focusing on a variety of lecture-related specifics, six overarching points are important to note. First, lecturing requires special attention and practice to become skilled at it. Effective lecturing is neither the mere reading of notes nor the casual regurgitation of facts. At its most fundamental level, lecturing is the verbal conveyance of one's robust topical understanding to another. Doing that in less time, more poignantly, and with greater student retention is a skill to be crafted through thoughtful planning, trial and error, frequent reflection, careful craftsmanship, and the observation of others.

The second point is that good lecturers work with the differences in learning styles resident in their audiences. The earlier chapter on adult learning described the stream of research called neurolinguistic programming that posits three fundamentally different learning patterns: audio, visual, and kinesthetic. Any moderately large lecture audience is likely to have each kind of learner in it.