ABSTRACT

Poor presentations make lectures useless, while good presentations make lectures useful. Good lectures – and, by extension, good presentations – are the ones that make students think and do so more efficiently than they could with a text (or any impersonal source) alone. Students need to think because, without doing so, they will not understand. However, it is difficult to think about new ideas, and good presentations tap into the power of distributed cognition to manage one’s cognitive load, make thinking more efficient, and enable one to think only about that which is critical to achieving understanding. This requires a different approach: one that focuses on the critical ideas and exploits the uniqueness of lectures, as explained in this chapter.