I usually intersperse my lectures with brief activities designed to check whether they understand the material. Then my handouts become whatever students need to participate in that activity. Example: lecture on Grimm's law: activity is taking a PIE root (e.g., perd-) and figuring out its PDE reflex by applying consonant shifts (and experimenting with different vowels); handout = summary of consonant shifts
I try to give them some way to apply the material during class because otherwise they just nod and follow along and then can't do the homework.
If the "handout" fits on a single slide, I just display the slide. I always prepare an "answer" slide with the activity solution, and I put my slides online, so that students who missed class can do the activity on their own.
I guess this is sort of like the graphic organizer Francis mentioned, but it might not include everything we've covered during class, just enough for students to do the activity. I think I'll try graphic organizers on those days when I can't think of a decent activity. (Martin, you should consider turning your handouts into a published study guide or textbook! They sound great!)
Beth
Beth Rapp Young
Assoc. Professor, English
University of Central Florida, Orlando
-----Original Message-----
From: Teaching Linguistics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dave Sayers
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2015 4:49 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: lecture handouts
Hi everyone,
This might seem like a deathly boring question, but I think it's worth considering. I used to use no handouts at all, just uploading the slides and supplementary material (sometimes inherited handouts) to the course site. Nobody brought any of these to lectures though, at least not as far as I could see, and I saw some eyes wandering and wondered if it might be down to not having anything in front of them to follow along with. I've also previously used extremely detailed handouts, but that seemed to be a disincentive to paying any attention to the lecture. Why bother when it's all written in front of you? And then, since it's in front of you and also on the screen, why not just, y'know, quickly check Facebook, and hey, look at this! Hah hah... So I looked into it in a bit more detail and found this article which pretty much backed up what I'd thought was going on:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.2350020203/abstract. The article showed that too much detail (e.g. just printing out the slides) meant students had no incentive to write any notes; too little detail caused many to lose track of the overall lecture; while providing a skeleton structure (just the main headings plus a little detail) avoided both these pitfalls and led to the highest scores in a standardised recall test. Nowadays I tend to give a single sheet with minimal detail and any really key quotes. It's double-spaced too so that they can easily scribble in the spaces. I think it's striking a happy medium, as per the article, based on their movements in class, though I haven't surveyed my students about it.
What are other people's approaches to handouts? I haven't mentioned the many possibilities of electronic handouts; I think that's kind of a separate issue. I thought I'd focus here on tree-killing teaching methods.
Dave
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Dr. Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University Honorary Research Fellow, Arts & Humanities, Swansea University (2009-2015) [log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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