TJ Walker argues lectures should be presentations designed to engage audiences. He recommends practicing on video, moving around the room, asking questions, and opening strong. A Duke professor stopped a student mid-reading to make a point about capturing attention.
Chapters
How can I improve my teaching skills and presentation skills now? There are a lot of different things involved with being a great teacher. One of them is standing up and presenting to the class. That's not the only one. But it is a huge part of what you do as a speaker. And you've got to look at it as a presentation, as a speech. Even if you're talking to second graders all day long, it's still a type of presentation. You still have to focus on. Am I engaging my audience? Are they paying attention? Too many teachers just have the attitude that they're going to stand up and write a whole bunch of text on a blackboard or show a bunch of things projected on a PowerPoint screen. That's not really teaching. My recommendation is practice what you want to convey in your teaching on video. Maybe you can't do it every single day for every single lecture, but for the ones you really care about, certainly your first lecture of the year with new students, make it interesting. Let them realize you're looking at them. I'll never forget a professor I had, Professor Kornberg, political science professor at Duke University. This was way back in 1981, huge lecture class, and one student in the back row was reading the Duke Chronicle, the newspaper. And the professor was not just standing in the front of the room lecturing at the blackboard. He moved around constantly. Well, when he saw this student reading the newspaper, he ran up, took the paper out of the student's hand and said, you read on your own time. And he thought, threw the paper down. Guess what? Everyone in the audience paid attention for the rest of the semester. Nobody was caught reading. Now, I realize in this day and age, you can't really take the cell phone out of a student's hand and throw it on the ground, even though there was a very famous YouTube video doing that. You'll get in trouble, but you can be interesting. You can be focused on your own audience, the students. You can't ask them questions throughout. Do that, you'll be a better presenter, a better speaker, and a better teacher.
