When lecturing, you should be more interested in ensuring
the students understand what you are saying than covering a specific amount of
material. Even if you manage to vocalize every important piece of information
about a particular subject, it is largely a wasted effort if the students are
not receiving the information. Your job is not to state all relevant facts, but
to communicate them to the students. It is easy for us to transmit data faster
than the students can absorb it. Remember, you have seen all this information before,
probably said it all before, many times. You are not having to mentally connect
the facts into a logical framework because you have already done that. However,
the students who are hearing it for the first time have to comprehend each
statement and then tie the different statements together in some logical manner
in order to really understand what they are hearing. Help them comprehend the
information by including analogies, similes, and connecting statements. One of
the most powerful teaching techniques is to introduce new concepts and ideas using
things people already know and understand. For example, “the refrigeration
system moves heat from one place to another, much like a sponge can absorb water
in one place and then release it in another when you squeeze it.” Like all
analogies, it is imperfect, but it starts the process of thinking about absorbing
heat in one place and releasing it somewhere else. Once you get that point
across you can start talking about what the refrigerant does to absorb heat.
Maybe boil some water in a flask. Learning is not just collecting data, it is
making mental connections between the data points to develop new concepts. This
takes time. If you are talking at gigabit speed while your students are
listening on dial-up, most of the information will be lost. I have been guilty
of this. I can recall asking students questions at the end of a one hour
lecture only to discover that they did not really understand something that I
said 15 minutes into my lecture. So although I discharged my duty to cover
everything, really, I just wasted everyone’s time – including mine! So when lecturing,
take some time along the way to ask a few questions and engage in some dialogue
with the students to make sure your message is being received. Remember, the
idea is not to demonstrate your knowledge, but to help the students increase
theirs.
