"Learning Happens at the Beginning and at the End. Research has shown that learning most frequently happens at the start and at the end of a message. Your message could be a presentation, advertisement or a lecture, it doesn’t matter – people remember the beginning and ending more than the middle. It’s called the primacy-recency principle and was first studied in the 1920’s. Movie directors understand this to well – that’s why in most movies something big usually happens within the first couple minutes and the best song is left until the end. They want you to remember the start of the movie and feel good at the end. We can apply this concept and provide a better learning experience for your audience."

Too many times we don’t do an adequate job of telling the audience why they should care about the material.

Remember, it’s not how much you know, but how much your audience learns during your lecture.

You solve the I’m-bored-in-the-middle-of-your-lecture syndrome simply by having more starting and ending points.

In one class I took they had an exercise titled “Vote with your feet”. The instructor would ask some controversial question and everyone would go to one side of the room or the other based on their answer. The class would then discuss the topic while standing.