Presentation (or lecture) is among the most commonly used strategies for knowledge acquisition and retention. But presentation is more than teachers talking.

 An effective presentation requires a highly structured environment in which the teacher is an active presenter and students are active listeners and thinkers.

Teachers use advance organizers - powerful concepts to which subordinate ideas and facts can be linked - to provide structure and then involve students in processing the new information.

The presentation strategy is grounded in information processing theory, which describes how learning occurs and how the mind organizes knowledge. The brain utilizes short-term memory for complex thought processes and long-term memory for information storage. Stored information is organized according to hierarchically ordered concepts and categories called cognitive structures. New information must be processed actively in short-term memory and tied to students' existing cognitive structures in long-term memory. Just as the mind has cognitive structures, every discipline has an organizational structure. Presentations should be organized around key ideas and structures and these structures should be made explicit to students.

Presentation enables teachers to organize and convey large amounts of information efficiently. It is an appropriate strategy for instructing students about the key ideas in a subject, for acquisition and retention of factual information linked to these ideas, and for comparing similarities and differences among ideas. Presentation is less appropriate for higher-level thinking, problem solving, and inquiry, although it may be used prior to such activities to ensure that students have the necessary foundational information.

There are four phases in a presentation lesson. The teacher begins the presentation by explaining the goals, sequence, and expectations of the lesson, and by helping students retrieve appropriate prior knowledge. In phase 2 the advance organizer is presented. Advance organizers are "scaffolds" that help learners link new information to what they already know. Advance organizers may be expository, comparative (relationships), or sequential (steps), and work best when accompanied by graphic or visual representations.

Phase 3 is the presentation itself. As new learning material is presented, the teacher pays particular attention to order and clarity, and provides concrete examples and illustrations that help students make required connections to what they already know.

In the final phase of a presentation, the teacher checks for student understanding and helps them integrate what they have learned. The teacher asks questions to encourage precise and critical thinking. Effective questions might involve asking for summaries, definitions, examples, comparisons, descriptions, analysis, or connections to the advance organizer. It is in this final phase that students integrate the new knowledge into their prior knowledge, build more complex cognitive structures, and develop understanding of complex relationships.The teacher carefully structures the learning environment during a presentation so students can hear and see the presentation, uses procedures to ensure a smooth and effective pace, and addresses off-task behaviors immediately