How to (quickly) write a lecture

I am now in my fourth consecutive semester of running new classes and I think I’ve figured out a pretty good system for writing lectures quickly. It is by no means perfect (as the linked slides and outline below reveal), but it gets the job done and has helped me make the most of my time.

(1) Write your lecture the day before.

This is scary the first few times, but will save you a lot of time and anxiety in the long-run. The other advantage is that the material is fresh in your mind, so you can extemporize well and you remember your notes. If you’re too nervous to try this the very first time, try writing your lecture well in advance, but in 24 hours. You will, however, really need to believe the deadline for this to work.

Regarding content, if you don’t know what you should be lecturing about, start by reading a textbook. The point is to get a sense of the key events, incidents, and people for the relevant period. Then find one or two key monographs to get some ideas for lecture themes. If there really isn’t a relevant textbook, find 2-3 monographs on the lecture topic. Read their introductions and reviews, and you’ll have the same list of key events, incidents, people, and arguments. The point is to spend ~2 hours at the beginning reviewing this material and compiling a rough list on paper. Take this list and try to break it into relevant parts using the structure described below. When it comes to finding images, wikipedia / wikimedia commons is your friend. As is google image search. Try to be more original than simply getting the top image for the relevant wikipedia article (though I’m at times guilty of this).

(2) Use bullet points, do not write out a talk. 

This saves a huge amount of time. It also avoids the dreaded problem of having WAY too much information. Lectures should be lean, otherwise the students get swamped. Ideally, a slide should have three to four relevant bullet points (and these can have a few sub-points). Anything more, and you’d be better off either streamlining things a bit more or adding a new slide. In my bulleted outline, I generally indicate a new slide with brackets and in bold: [SLIDE TITLE]. Makes it easy to see, especially if it’s buried in some larger outline point.

(3) Have a clear structure that you use every lecture.

This helps the students with note-taking. It also makes life easier for you. Below is the structure I use. It could be improved, but I find it covers the rights bases of keeping it interesting, being clear, and providing the key information. This is based on a 90 minute lecture; for shorter lectures, I’d probably do two “content chunks” and one student discussion topic halfway through:

1. [Announcements] Tell the students about updated readings, due dates, etc. This is a boring necessity, so get it out of the way immediately.

2. [Hook] An anecdote or story to introduce the topic and lecture themes.

3. [Overview] Signposting is key. I generally have a three point overview.

4. [Content chunk 1] Any number of slides, lecture for 30 minutes or so.

5. [Discussion Q] No matter how good you are, your students are now bored. So put a slide with some sort of discussion question. These don’t have to be complicated or deep historical questions, in fact, you want something the students can latch on to. This is as much about refocusing them and getting out some energy as being a pedagogical exercise. If you really can’t think of anything, often an image to interpret/discuss is a good way to get the audience involved.

6. [Content chunk 2] Back at it for 30 minutes or so.

7. [Discussion Q] At the ~60 minute mark, they’re bored again. You need a short discussion to refocus.

8. [Content Chunk 3] Last piece of lecture.

9. [Contextualizing the reading] Be sure to explicitly link the lecture to the readings, the students don’t always connect the dots. How you do this will vary by course format, but make an effort.

10. [Conclusions] Remind them about the key takeaways.

11. [Key terms / dates] I always end with a list of key terms and a short (6 date) timeline. Helps a lot for review and their notes.

12. [Additional reading] I like to suggest three books if they’re interested in more detail. These are academic. Very very occasionally I recommend fiction, a film, or documentary.

13. [Next lecture or week] Set up the next one!

Finally, post the slides online in advance if you can and I like to make a sheet with the lecture’s key quotations. A sample set of slides is here. The outline is here.  It’s a lecture I gave on the Columbian Exchange for the early part of a course on colonial America. In preparation, I read a relevant chapter from a textbook on the history of the Americas and combined that with ideas/material from Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange and Virginia Anderson’s Creatures of Empire. Note that this material is not edited for this post, so they’re a bit rough, which is to say, they’re realistic. The day of lecture I also review the printed outline and sometimes make changes/corrections in pen, so the actual lecture may have been very slightly different. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but the lecture went well and I followed the rules here (though I wrote it before I appreciated the value of contextualizing the tutorial/section readings).

Note on outline length: This is more of a question of feel, so it’s hard to give an abstract estimate. You’ll figure it out in the first few lectures. But if you’re curious, all of my lectures are 90 minutes (more like 80 if you include class change time) and my lecture outlines vary in length, but are usually around 2,400-2,600 words. That includes a few quotes (when I have many long quotes—generally to be avoided—it can push 3000) and student discussion time, which of course complicates things a bit. Your mileage will vary.