Do's and don'ts of effective lecturing:

1.  Come prepared. Come early to make sure all your visual aids work, look at your audience, prepare psychologically to your surroundings. Hold something like a pen in your hand.

2.  The opening sentence of the lecture is crucial: State your lecture goals. Keep it short and simple. Practice it out loud at home.

3.  Try to grab your audience's interest right at the start. Start with a story. Ask them questions.

4.  To impress your audience: Use statistics, numbers, comparisons, analogies, names of discoverers, dates etc.

5.  Aim for no more than 4-5 main points that need to be learned per lesson. Summarize at the end of each step, state that you are moving on to the next step. At the end of the lecture, summarize the main take-home points.

6.  Use of the board: Write on the board; turn to your audience and then talk. DO NOT write and explain with your back to the audience.

7.  Use 'open' body language: keep eye contact, face your audience squarely keeping legs slightly apart, use hand movements (keep hands free so they can move), make use of facial expressions. Move around.

8.  Use your voice: no non-words like eeeh, OK, be-etsem…. Use pauses instead. Modulate your tone (volume and pitch). Keep your sentences short and simple. Use active rather than passive language. Do not speak too fast.

9.  Powerpoint wisdom:

·  Use as few words/sentences per slide as possible. This way you will avoid reading off your slides

·  Each slide should concentrate on one point and the header should summarize it. For example header: “Fungi are major recyclers of plant material”, or “Aspergillus proteases induce cytokine release in infected cells”. Each of these states a single point. If you cannot summarize a slide in a single short statement, it means you need to split it into additional slides.

·  Spend most of your time looking at your audience and NOT at your slides.

·  Use as many pictures as possible but avoid clutter (too many pics on 1 slide)

·  Minimal font size: 28

·  Use summary slides.

·  Use question slides.

·  Use blank slides when you want the audience to focus only ON YOU.

·  Use flowcharts to highlight the logic of your presentation and how things connect to each other

Dr. Nir Osherov, 2006.