The Interactive Lecture: How to Engage Students, Build Memory, and Deepen Comprehension (A Strategic Teacher PLC Guide) (Strategic Teacher PLC Guides)

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.
* Reflect deeply on your lesson to refine and expand your use of the strategy.
* Examine student work at various levels of proficiency and use your findings to plan next steps in building students' recall and comprehension.

Harvey F. Silver, president of Silver Strong & Associates and Thoughtful Education Press, and Matthew J. Perini, director of publishing for Silver Strong & Associates and Thoughtful Education Press, have collaborated on several best sellers in education, including ASCD's The Strategic Teacher and Thoughtful Education Press's Tools for Promoting Active, In-Depth Learning, which won a Teachers' Choice Award in 2004.