How to present it? On the rhetoric of an outstanding lecturer

Abstract

This paper analyses a lecture by an excellent teaching award winner professor of mathematics, given to high school mathematics teachers. The analysis is based upon two sources: (i) the lecture plan, as expressed in a series of 29 transparencies, prepared by the lecturer in advance; (ii) the actual implementation of the lecture, as transcribed from its video-taped record. Based on this analysis six principles for planning and giving a good lecture were developed. The paper provides the readers with full details of the content as well as non-verbal communication gestures exemplifying the employment of the six principles.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Professor David Chillag for his cooperation in providing the basic data for this paper; Ms Suzie Shapiro for her assistance in translating the Hebrew video transcription of the lecture; and Dr Miri Barak for her advice on chemistry issues.

Notes

Professor Chillag received the Technion's Excellent Teacher Award for ten consecutive years, and consequently was declared ‘Permanent Excellent Lecturer’.

In the rest of the paper we refer to Professor Chillag as ‘the lecturer’.

The Benzene molecule C₆H₆ is a cyclic plane compound which consists of six carbon atoms at the vertices of a hexagon with a hydrogen atom attached to each carbon atom. There is a nice anecdote about Friedrick Kekulé who solved in 1865 the chemical problem of the arrangement of carbon and hydrogen atoms in the compound Benzene. The solution, they say, occurred to Kekulé in a moment of insight while dreaming about a snake which had seized its own tail. The dream was the immediate antecedent of his idea about the Benzene ring, which had turned out to be one of the most important discoveries in all of organic chemistry [6]).

In the illustrative examples we use the following format: Regularly typed letters are used for excerpts from the English translation of the transcription of the talk; boldface letters indicate what in the lecturer's saying demonstrates the principle under discussion; our comments appear in italic.