Effective Medical Lecturing: Practice Becomes Theory: A Narrative Review

Effective lecturing stimulates learning, creates a verbal history for our profession, and is a central basis for evaluating academic promotion. Unfortunately, few resources exist in the medical literature to guide the academician toward success as an effective lecturer. Using evidence-based principles, this review fosters adult learning in academic venues by incorporating the latest innovations in educational theory for both online and traditional teaching. The novice or advanced academic teacher will be guided toward critical self-evaluation of current teaching practices and encouraged to replace ineffective methods with ones more likely to be both rewarding and rewarded. By introducing literature-based learning techniques, emphasizing audience targeting, truncating content to an appropriate level of detail, effectively linking images and text, and accepting the brevity of learners’ attentiveness, we show that the audience, not the speaker, is the primary educational focus.