How to Give a Lecture: From a Student's Perspective

In the past two years studying Computer Science at Cambridge, I've had my fair share of lectures, both good and bad. In this post, I'll be sharing (very directly) my personal opinions on what makes a good lecture course, and indeed a bad one.

It's not meant to be a reference guide of any sort for any potential lecturers out there, but as a student there are a couple of things that I just wanted to get out of my mind. I might be so direct to the point where it sounds rude. That's not my intention, but I do hope it sparks some thought and reflection. The main point of this blog post is not to dictate how I think lecturers should teach (because I only can only point out what works well for me), but that lecturers should at least be intentional about how they teach.

Know Your Audience

This sounds really obvious, and I think it is. Everyone's heard this at least a thousand times. But for some reason, lecturers really like to teach again what's been taught in previous courses, while knowing full well that it's being taught in another course.

Some lecturers think that people need a refresher, and sure maybe they do. But a brief refresher will suffice, not half the lecture spent going through things that had already been meticulously taught in the past. Even worse is when a lecturer refers to knowledge in a future course without explaining it - how are we expected to know this? I know that the course undergoes reshuffling every year, but I think having the future knowledge of hundreds of people banking on your teaching justifies the effort to spend a few days adjusting the course for each cohort.

In addition, there are some things that you would expect any student that's done reasonably in their A-levels to know. Please don't ask us "whether we've heard of e". I get that it's been decades since the lecturers were undergraduates, but having a sense of the current ability of your students is crucial to knowing what to skim through and what to emphasise.

You're teaching to teach, not to cover the course

There's no point rushing if you're not teaching well. Yes, there is a set amount of stuff to cover in a set amount of time. But your first priority should not be to "read out the examinable syllabus over the course of twelve lectures", but to teach in a way that is most understandable to the students. And if you want to do this, you first have to think "how do I teach this in a way that is most understandable to my students?". Easy, right?

You'd be surprised, but often the best way to teach isn't to read definitions out at them slide after slide. I personally really like it when lecturers give enough motivation for the subject - why should we even be learning this in the first place? What does the skeleton of this topic look like? These questions should be answered in the first lecture of the course. The rest of the course can then build on the skeleton, so that students don't just accept one definition after another, but they understand why this definition was necessary in the first place.

Appeal to intuition

Often times, when a student studies, what they're really trying to do is to extract the intuition from a piece of content like a lecture/notes/textbook. So it really helps when the lecturer presents that intuition directly to them, saving them the trouble of having to waft through the faff. And no, the effort doesn't "leave a stronger impression" and therefore facilitate our learning. The point of the teacher is to make the learning as easy as possible, by presenting the knowledge as clearly as possible. There's no point purposefully confusing the student in hopes that they would find out for themselves. Most students simply won't bother, and the ones that do would have had the discipline to use that extra time on something more productive.

Encoding, how the information gets input into our brain, makes a big difference to how well we retain the knowledge that we've learnt. And if the teacher is able to present things in an intuitive manner (such that the information is encoded well), then everyone would learn better, as simple as that.

The Curse of Learning

Well, you might think, how do I know what is intuitive to a student? It's pretty understandable that after decades of being immersed within a subfield, a lecturer would forget what it's like to not know that topic like the back of their hand. So what they find intuitive is very difficult for others, and what others find intuitive they didn't even think needed learning. This is called the curse of learning.

So how do we deal with this? Frankly, I don't know. I think the ideal way would have been to document your thinking process while you were learning the topic (what you found confusing, what needed pointing out) such that you are able to see what past you would have found helpful, but for most lecturers they're well past that stage. The next best thing would probably be to get as much feedback as possible from students (maybe running a trial class?) or running the outline of the course through a PhD student that recently graduated from the university. Dear reader, if you have any ideas, do let me know.

Structure is Important

It's not just what you teach or how you teach, but when you teach it also matters a lot. A well-structured lecture feels natural, where each concept is the direct consequence of another. A poorly structured lecture, on the other hand, makes the student confused and unable to follow.

This sounds really obvious, but I'm surprised by how many lecturers don't impose an intuitive structure to their lecturers. Or if they do, they don't make it obvious enough to the student (because as I stated before, what is intuitive to the lecturer might not be the same to the student).

They'll be jumping back and forth between seemingly unrelated concepts, expecting the students to hold everything within their brain and draw connections between them automatically. When the structure is not directly pointed out, it's really difficult to derive that hidden connection live during the lecture, and it's made even worse when connections need to be drawn across multiple lectures.

You might expect the student to put in the work to draw their own connections so that they remember more clearly, but a lot of times they'll just think "I have no idea what is going on, how this is related to anything else, why we're learning this in the first place, and I'm just going to accept it and not think about it too much". It takes an absurd amount of work to create order out of chaos (especially if you're a beginner in that topic), and we would be much better served if the lecturer could instead clearly state "this is connected to this in that way, and this is why we have to learn this, and in this order". Once again, you're teaching to help the student understand, not to make it intentionally difficult.

Speak Clearly

All of the presentation skills in giving talks/presentations apply to lectures. Don't mumble under your breath (even if it's meant to be an offhand joke), speak loudly, slowly and clearly. Make eye contact with the students, observe their reactions to see if they understand something/find something confusing, and try to take notice of raised hands as soon as possible.

Other tips and tricks that I like

• one lecturer hands out chocolates to anyone who asks/answers a question.
• one lecturer keeps the "table of contents" of the lecture at the side so it's clear what the overall structure of the lecture is, and our current progress through the lecture. I think it helps a lot.

Conclusion

In conclusion, sit down for a day and think about how you're going to teach a course well, before actually delivering the course to hundreds of students. Sometimes, stopping and thinking is what is most needed.

I hope you got something out of this post (and please don't mind the tone, I was very direct for the sake of clarity). What do you think makes a good lecture/lecture course/lecturer? How do we help students learn better? Let me know your thoughts!