Hitting Pause

65 Lecture Breaks to Refresh and Reinforce Learning

Gail Taylor Rice

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781620366554
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Pauses constitute a simple technique for enlivening and enhancing the effectiveness of lectures, or indeed of any form of instruction, whether a presentation or in an experiential setting. This book presents the evidence and rationale for breaking up lectures into shorter segments by using pauses to focus attention, reinforce key points, and review learning. It also provides 65 adaptable pause ideas to use at the opening of class, mid-way through, or as closers.Starting with brain science research on attention span and cognitive load, Rice bases her book on two fundamental principles: shorter segments of instruction are better than longer ones, and learners who actively participate in instruction learn better than those who don't.Pausing helps teachers apply these principles and create student engagement without requiring major changes in their lesson plans. With careful planning, they can integrate pauses into learning sessions with ease and significantly reinforce student learning. They will also gain feedback on students' comprehension.Rice sets out the characteristics of good pauses, gives advice on how to plan them and how to introduce them to maximum effect. She provides compelling examples and concludes with a repertory of pauses readers can easily modify and apply to any discipline. This book contains a compendium of strategies that any teacher can fruitfully use to reinforce learning, as well as a stepping stone to those seeking to transition to more active learning methods. It: • Makes the case for using pauses
• Identifies the primary functions of pauses: focusing, refocusing, enhancing retention, or closing off the learning experience
• Provides research evidence from cognitive science and educational psychology
• Provides practical guidance for creating quick active learning breaks
• Distinguishes between starting, middle, and closing pauses
• Includes descriptions, with suggested applications, of 65 pauses

PART ONE

BENEFITS OF PAUSING

1

WHY WE NEED TO PAUSE

As a new college instructor, I was excited to attend my first national conference on teaching and learning. It was organized by a group that described itself as being opposed to lectures. There would be no plenary addresses and no large group session, only small-group breakouts at this conference. Presenters were told to plan for interactive learning sessions with no lecturing. I thought I would be experiencing all kinds of new ways to teach when attending these engaging learning opportunities, but I was in for a surprise. Every single session started out the same way. Presenters stood behind a lectern and talked. Most did eventually get around to some kind of large-group discussion or small-group activities, but virtually all of them started by lecturing.

I did learn from the conference, and I have been hooked on teaching and learning conferences ever since, but I have to admit that I was baffled that even a conference that advertised itself as committed to alternatives to lecturing consisted of an awful lot of lecturing.

The Predominance of the Lecture

If nearly every session at a conference where lecturing is discouraged starts with a presentation that looks a lot like a lecture, it shouldn’t surprise us that the lecture is pretty dominant in most of academia. Register for a national meeting of any academic society and attend a large-group session or a breakout workshop. You can probably expect to sit quietly, listen to someone talk, and take notes. In fact, it isn’t that unusual to go to an academic meeting and discover that the time is devoted to the reading of a paper. Find a college or university, slip into any undergraduate or graduate class, and you are likely to hear a fairly traditional lecture.

Considered the standard model of academic teaching, the large college lecture continues to dominate college classrooms, particularly the humanities, comprising well over 80% of all courses (Dennick & Exley, 2004; Kimball & Milanowski, 2009; Neuman, 2001).

An example of the fact that professors love to lecture and will continue to use it as an appropriate way to teach appeared in an article by Molly Worthen (2015), a university professor, who stated the following in support of the traditional lecture:

In the humanities there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course. . . . Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities’ most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning, skills whose value extends beyond the classroom to the essential demands of working life and citizenship.

History of the Lecture

The lecture has a long tradition. The word lecture means “to read.” Lecturing started centuries ago when people read texts and listeners copied what they heard word for word. Religion scholars would travel hundreds of miles to hear monks read from ancient scrolls. Early academics had only oral instruction as a method to learn as they listened and copied down what they heard (Garside, 1996; Thelin, 2011). Before the printing press, before the Internet, this was how new information was shared, so it made sense to think of it as a good way to learn—probably because it was the only way to learn.

Lecture Continues Despite Criticisms

To Stanford physics professor Carl Wieman, the college lecture is the educational equivalent of bloodletting, a common way to treat illnesses from ancient Greek times until the late nineteenth century (Westervelt, 2016). Although medical practices have changed significantly over time, educational approaches have not. Wieman suggests that the typical college lecture today does as much good as bloodletting did a hundred years ago. Whatever learning occurs takes place despite the lecture, rather than because of it (Westervelt, 2016).

Wieman’s concern about undergraduate education and our overreliance on lecturing is not new. Traditional lectures have been under scrutiny for some time. Earlier criticisms focused on limitations of the lecture. Bligh (2000) suggested that lectures are really only good for transmitting information, and that other ways of teaching are better suited to all the additional objectives teachers have for their students, such as changing attitudes, developing behavioral skills, or promoting deep thought.

The biggest concerns with the lecture approach focus on our tendencies to monopolize the classroom conversation with “teacher talk.” We do not allow anyone else to speak when we are behind the lectern providing a constant stream of information. When active learning proponents emerged (Bonwell & Eison, 1991), a number of professors began to criticize traditional lectures as old-fashioned and inappropriate ways to teach students, particularly students who were becoming more and more visual and less aural in their learning style as well as increasingly used to fast-moving media and highly stimulating technology.

Finkel (2000) tells us, “Educational research over the past twenty-five years has established beyond a doubt a simple fact: What is transmitted to students through lecturing is simply not retained for any significant length of time” (p. 3). Our students actually learn only when we cut away from the traditional lecture where we are the only ones talking. Evaluations of alternative approaches to lecturing reveal that students achieve deeper understanding, have lower failure rates, and improve test performance by as much as 50%. Wieman (2014) argues,

In fact, the data on the power of these techniques are so persuasive, it’s almost unethical to teach undergraduates any other way. I know you can double how much a student learns depending on what method the instructor is using. (cited in Westervelt [2016])

Despite the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that the lecture method is “substantially less effective” (Wieman, 2014, p. 8319) than active learning methods of teaching, we professors continue to spend a good bit of our time doing exactly what Bligh describes as lecturing, that is, “more or less continuous expositions by a speaker who wants the audience to learn something” (Bligh, 2000, p. 4). When we speak to very large audiences, when we do our TED talks, when we have opportunities to give plenary addresses, when we have a specific objective of providing information in a short amount of time, for example, we find the lecture to be a compelling way to teach.

Improving the Lecture

Because lecturing continues despite various criticisms, it is helpful to consider what Phillip Boffey suggested about lecturing at Harvard University back in 1962, when he asserted that it wasn’t necessary to get rid of the lecture but instead to improve it. And that is our focus now as well. Rather than try to reinvent what we have been doing in our classrooms and clinics, suppose we look for ways to effectively rehabilitate our lectures. Our solution for rehabilitating lectures taps into what we know about engagement and cooperative learning. Nelson (2010) reminds us that “effort spent improving lectures is wasted unless the pedagogy already has been transformed to use effective cooperative learning” (p. 123). We might discover that “some comparatively simple changes could make a big difference” (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014, p. 9).

Pauses Could Save Lectures

This brings us to the central premise of this book: By adding pauses to our lectures, we can create engaging cooperative learning experiences and improve learning outcomes. Learning pauses help us chunk information, which is critical to good learning. Students will learn more when we talk less and insert strategic pauses into the lecture. Harrington and Zakrajsek (2017) tell us that “incorporating lecture pauses where active learning strategies are used helps to maintain student attention” (p. 55). A lecture pause occurs when instructor talk stops, and students are asked to think about their learning and what they will do with it. These learning pauses represent the powerful small changes that can maximize learning. Ideally, learning pauses occur at the start and the close of all learning experiences; midpauses may be necessary as well, depending on the length and complexity of the session. Many of our colleagues think these pauses are only needed for long, tedious sessions where attention is bound to wander. But even a five-minute, one-on-one instruction will benefit from pausing to find out where the student is, what his or her perceived needs and prior experiences are and pausing to close with the student’s summary of what she or he is taking away from this instruction.

James Lang (2016a) encourages faculty members to take a few minutes at the beginning of class to pause for students to ponder the topic of the day. His complementary article contains ideas for closing pauses, such as asking students to consider how the class helped answer the questions raised at the beginning (Lang, 2016b). In these two articles and his book, Lang (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) provides a number of ways teachers can achieve quite different results by making small adjustments in their classroom teaching.

A number of authors offer specific intentional educational activities to help faculty members add active learning experiences to their classroom lectures. Honeycutt (2016) suggests that focusing activities minimize distractions, maintain momentum, and create more time for learning. Major, Harris, and Zakrajsek (2016) is another valuable resource that gives readers strategies for pausing teacher talk for student learning. The authors wrote, “We assert that presenting mini-lectures and pausing [emphasis added] between segments can improve the pacing of a given lecture. It provides students with an opportunity to collect their thoughts and reflect upon their learning” (p. 12). The practice of the pause has great promise for increasing the impact of our lectures. When we pause and allow students to make meaning of the lecture, they move beyond just acquiring new information, they can progress beyond recall and understanding. They start to analyze, apply, or evaluate.

In contrast, when only the teacher talks, students are unlikely to focus. Wieman (2014) describes teaching physics at Stanford this way, saying that most of the time

only 10% [of the students] would actually remember the answer. A lot of them are asleep, or lost, and I don’t know whether they’re getting anything out of it. If I’m standing up there talking at them, I have no clue what they’re absorbing and not absorbing. . . . If I’m just lecturing the whole time, what a terrible waste that would be. Half the material would be over their head, and half the material would be completely trivial to them.

But when the teacher takes a break and invites students into the conversation, the lecture takes on new energy, and higher cognitive learning occurs. It is only when we pause that we give students opportunities to connect to prior experiences, to personalize, generalize, analyze, evaluate, create, and value.

Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, reflected on Wieman’s use of these learning pauses and his abandonment of the pure lecture method in the following: “The large lecture, and racing through material, doesn’t allow you to slow down to see the beauty of what you’re learning” (as cited in Westervelt, 2016).

This book shows that new instructors can develop powerful lectures, and seasoned professors can resurrect lectures by simply slowing down and helping students see the beauty of what they are learning. We do this by making what Lang (2016a, 2016b, 2016c) refers to as small changes, providing learning pauses that allow students to enter the conversation and transforming the lecture from a monologue to a dialogue.

Problems When Planning Lectures

When I observed a fellow faculty member teach at my campus, I could see how she had earned the reputation for being a good lecturer. I watched her deliver a well-crafted 50-minute presentation. All 150 of the students were in their places ready for class to start. They paid close attention to the instructor as she carefully proceeded through her PowerPoint slides and ended exactly on time. The professor provided detailed information on the topic of the day. At the end of the session, the students applauded, gathered their laptops and notes, and left the room. During the hour no student spoke. The instructor asked no questions. No cases were discussed and no probing dilemmas presented.

A couple of days later I sat down with the teacher to share my notes and discuss my observations. I showed her how she reduced tension when she told the class that a particularly difficult concept would not be on the test. I complimented her on how nicely organized her outline was, and how well her slides matched the outline she had posted on the website. I described the close attention the students paid to her monologue and the notes I observed them writing on the printed outlines. She seemed a little surprised when I mentioned before I left that I would be happy to look at her lesson plan for her next session if she would like and perhaps offer a suggestion or two. She asked me what I might have suggested if I had looked ahead of time at this lesson.

I responded that she might have paused for a moment at the beginning of class to ask her learners to think about their previous experiences with the topic. I also suggested that she might have paused midway during her fast-paced monologue to ask the students a question or two, to allow for a brief testing or review of pathogens discussed in an earlier lesson. Maybe she could have given her students a matching activity about the oral pathogens they were studying. Any of these pauses would not have taken more than a couple of minutes, but my colleague looked at me with a shocked expression and responded, “Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of doing something like that. I have my class timed down to the second. I know exactly how much I can cover, and I have no time to waste with stuff like that.”

When I mentioned how much talking is correlated with learning, she responded, “I know—it is so gratifying for me to rehearse these lectures, as it helps me to really nail down the information in my own head.” She didn’t get it. This wasn’t about her, it was about her students.

My colleague thinks what so many of us have thought for so long. Our job is to lecture; we have the knowledge needed to fill the empty containers of our students.

Pauses Could Have Helped

Many of my colleagues would give this lecture high ratings, but how would a learning specialist rate it? What would Nobel laureate and Stanford physics professor Wieman have said about it? Would a cognitive scientist suggest that she could turn this lecture from a performance into a learning experience with a few simple pauses? Our new, devoted research professor doesn’t have to give up her lecture to be effective. She can keep her PowerPoint slides and her well-constructed outline. All she has to do is make some small changes, such as adding a starting pause to allow the students to think about the cold sore they had when they were kids, a little Beat the Clock (MP 35) pause midway, and a paired Exam Question Challenge (CP 58) pause at the end. It could have been an exciting ending if the instructor promised a couple of bonus points for any pair whose question got used on the final exam. At a cost of five to seven minutes of lecture time, she could have transformed her performance into a significant learning experience.

The following illustrates how pausing can make a big difference. Neil Mehta, a colleague of mine, was wondering how to educate residents and faculty about giving formative feedback. He had observed that the institutional culture was about providing mostly summative feedback at the end of the rotation. He wanted to give this audience a sense of how students feel when they start a clinical rotation, how intimidated they might be, and how faculty and residents can help them navigate this new setting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Benefits of Pausing
• Part Two: Brain Science Support for the Pause
• Part Three: Reasons for Pausing
• Appendix Pauses You Can Use
• References
• About the Author
• Index
• Also available from Stylus
• Backcover