Planning a Technical Lecture for Adults

I've already written about how to structure a lecture for adults , but that's a high-level article that's partly about delivery. In this article, I want to get specific and tactical about planning a technical talk.

Identify what's critical

First, how much time do you have and what do you want to cover? Make a good, long list of everything you'd like to cover.

Then, remember that your learners are busy adults, and that during their lecture their minds will drift to that scary headline they saw on Twitter, and they'll remember relatively little of what you cover.

So! What are the few absolutely critical things your learners need to know? What will prevent failure in their explorations of this topic?

For example, if you're talking about how to bake bread, the most critical elements might be your recipe and how to know when the dough is done at each stage. Anything else--like possible variations on the recipe--is good to know, but not absolutely critical to successfully baking a loaf of bread.

Don't worry! You're going to include more content than this. But separate out the absolutely critical.

How many critical things should you include? I'm still experimenting with this, and it'll vary from one topic to the next. Right now, I'm standardizing on 3 items per hour.

How are you going to fill an hour just covering 3 things? Cover them from multiple angles and perspectives. Show both success and failure. Make bread several different times (conceptually speaking) and talk about what happens when you don't let it rise, or when it rises too long.

And if it still feels like a small amount of material for the time you have, don't worry; we're going to add more content in the next stage of this process.

What do you do with everything that wasn't critical? Put all that into an addendum at the end of your lecture. This material is ideal for a few slides, or a link to an online document where you cover all those nice-to-know aspects of your topic. Your learners will appreciate having a document they can refer back to again and again for all that information.

Add interactivity

Unfortunately, you're not done yet.

Your learners will not absorb your topic if you just talk for an hour straight. There's something about listening to a person for a long time that, eventually, puts us all to sleep. The more your learners can actively engage with the topic, the better.

So, what are some questions you can ask your learners that demonstrate they've synthesized the material? In other words, you're not just going to ask, "Any questions?" You're going to ask, "Given what we've covered so far about loaves made with 4 cups of flour, how long would you expect a loaf made with 6 cups needs to bake?" Ask them to use the knowledge they've gained in a (slightly) new situation.

Add those questions to your lecture notes.

In addition, what are some activities your learners can do to demonstrate that they've learned the material? In our baking example, ideally we'd ask them to bake a loaf themselves. That may be a bit much to ask, but you have other options:

• Give them a complex scenario, ask them to figure out what might happen (alone, in pairs, or in groups), then discuss.
• Create a scenario and put it into an online poll.
• Point them to a website where they can run a simulation of at least some part of the topic you're covering.

Now, build those activities in the appropriate software as necessary, and incorporate them into your lecture notes.

And, break!

Finally, plan for breaks. I've found that taking a 5-minute break every 30 minutes is just about perfect at keeping learners focused for hours. Find a good spot in your lecture for that break, and explicitly call it out in your lecture notes so you won't forget.

All of this should help your material really stick in the minds of your learners. And isn't that the point?

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Hope this helps! I'm Brent P. Newhall, I teach adults to code at the?Capital One Developers Academy , and I think a lot about how best to learn.