A factsheet designed to introduce the UK Professional Standards Framework (PSF) and explain how it relates to the teaching resources developed for the professional development resources in the collection.

This collection of resources for English lecturers (and others) provides platforms and exercises through which to refine your ideas about what a lecture should and can do pedagogically. Included are examples of actual lectures, guidance on how to evaluate and reflect upon your own and other people's lectures, a mock ‘bad’ lecture and suggestions for how to stretch the limits of large-group teaching structures.

The activities in this resource, like the peer review activities elsewhere in this collection, are designed to prompt individuals or groups to begin thinking critically about what makes a good lecture/lecturer. Included are a mock ‘bad’ lecture to evaluate and an exercise in self-reflection on your own methods of delivering a lecture—are you more comfortable using an improvisational technique or do you write your lectures out word for word?

There are two activities in this collection and both encourage you to be able to make a conscious shift between content (what you want to get across) and the dramatic and affective form through which you are going to have to perform it. The activities are appropriate for individuals or groups and comprise peer review work as well as an opportunity to think of the lecture as a genre. One activity utilises video footage of Dr Hannah Crawforth (King’s College London), who discusses lectures as a form of rhetoric. The other activity asks that you attend a colleague’s lecture, record yourself giving a lecture, or use a video of someone else’s lecture as a starting point.

There are three activities in this resource, and they have been created around actual lectures delivered by staff at Royal Holloway, University of London, King’s College London and the University of Nottingham. Each lecture demonstrates different approaches to lecturing. The peer review activities are designed to prompt individuals or groups to begin thinking critically about what makes a good lecture/lecturer and what tools and tasks can help make a particular lecture more or less successful.