The Interactive Lecture : How to Engage Students, Build Memory, and Deepen Comprehension

When you want to implement the ideas from our ultimate guide to teaching strategies, The Strategic Teacher, here's the tool you need for mastering the Interactive Lecture. Use the activities, sample lectures, and planning forms with a group of teachers to learn

- What an Interactive Lecture is and how it can help you incorporate memory-enhancing techniques into your instruction.
- How to plan and implement an Interactive Lecture and take a "test run" with a critical friend to provide feedback on the lecture.
- How to evaluate the feedback from your first lesson and use it to implement another lesson.
- What to look for in student work to help you improve instructional decision making.

Be sure to order enough guides to enable every teacher to engage in all the hands-on learning activities.

You're holding a new kind of professional development tool called a Strategic Teacher PLC Guide. Designed in partnership with more than 75 schools, Strategic Teacher PLC Guides make the important work of bringing high-impact, research-based instructional practices into every classroom easier than ever before. Each guide focuses on one strategy from the bestselling ASCD book The Strategic Teacher: Selecting the Right Research-Based Strategy for Every Lesson and serves as a complete professional development resource for a team of teachers (or professional learning community) to learn, plan, and implement the strategy in their classrooms.

This guide focuses on the Interactive Lecture, a strategy that increases students' abilities to think actively about the content of lectures and presentations so they can lock the critical information in their memories. The Interactive Lecture engages students and helps them build strong permanent memories by leading them through the following four-phase learning process:

* Connect: The lecture begins with a hook that helps students connect their experiences and background knowledge to the lecture topic.

* Organize: The lecturer presents information in manageable "chunks," which students record on visual organizers.

* Dual-Code: The lecturer uses a variety of presentation techniques to make content more memorable.

* Exercise and Elaborate: The lecture closes with a synthesis task that has students integrate or summarize what they have learned.

This PLC Guide takes you and your colleagues on a "guided tour" of the Interactive Lecture, enabling you to

* Learn how the techniques built into the Interactive Lecture help students actively process and remember critical information.

* Experience a model lesson using the Interactive Lecture and learn from sample lessons and planning forms designed by other teachers.

* Plan a complete Interactive Lecture for your classroom.