Lecturing is one of the most common and oldest forms of instruction. In recent years, lecturing has also become one of the more controversial teaching strategies as well. Recently, my campus hosted my friend and co-author, Todd Zakrajsek, who spoke on his book, Dynamic Lecturing: Research-Based Strategies to Enhance Lecture Effectiveness. In today’s post, I want to share some of the highlights from the book and advice regarding planning dynamic and effective lectures.
The Atlantic published an essay from Christine Gross-Loh entitled, “Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?” This follows a similar op-ed published in the New York Times, “Lecture Me. Really.” Is there someone out there assaulting lecturers? Are there colleges out there eliminating the lecture? Is there even a college out there that could force an elimination if they tried? What is this really about? There is a growing and substantial body of research that suggests the importance of engagement and active learning. This scholarship has led to calls to reduce the frequency (more importantly, the length) of lectures in favor of engaging students in the classroom. Clearly, those who believe in the power and potential of lectures feel under threat. Yet, the research is clear that the inclusion of active learning helps students learn content better. The defense of the lecture in the Atlantic essay is long on anecdotal support for lecturing and wrong in numerous ways. In response, I want to respond to a few of the most inaccurate passages as a response to the Atlantic and underline my central argument: active learning doesn’t harm students.
When I work with faculty on improving their teaching, one of the areas that I constantly try to get them to improve is in their lecturing. Particularly in certain disciplines, lecturing is the primary instructional approach used by professors. Lecturing is probably the oldest teaching approach and can be effective. However, lecturing can also be done very poorly as the stereotype of the professor reading form the yellowed lecture notes illustrates. I try to convince faculty to include more active learning approaches into their classes and I find the pause procedure is an excellent vehicle for this. In today’s post, I want to share an excerpt from my book on college teaching (Teaching for Learning) that describes the pause procedure and how to use it effectively in the college classroom.
The lecture is one of the oldest teaching strategies in the world, yet it remains one of the most controversial. Some faculty passionately argue for the value and effectiveness of lecturing while others suggest that the approach is one of the biggest challenges for helping college students learn. This debate has been in the forefront lately thanks to a New York Times column by Molly Worthen, “Lecture Me. Really.” Professor Worthen’s piece, while thought provoking, misses the mark in several places particularly in describing active learning as not much more than a fad. Moreover, her pieces failed to consider the growing and substantial body of empirical research on lecturing—research that shows the strengths and weaknesses of lecturing. My recent book with Claire Major and Todd Zakrajsek (Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Educational Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success) explores the research literature on lecturing and in today’s post I want to describe some of the key findings to provide empirical information to the lecture debate.
The primary purpose of lecturing is to transfer content and information from an expert faculty member to novice students. Lectures take many forms from formal lectures to lecture-discussions that include student questions.
In our work, we identified the following advantages of lecturing:
The weaknesses of lectures are:
As with all teaching approaches, there are advantages and disadvantages of lecturing. So what should faculty do? In our review of the research literature, we identified five findings that can improve the effectiveness of lectures for instructors that desire to use lectures.
Additionally, much of the research that finds lectures as ineffective examined traditional, full class lectures. Recent studies suggest that lectures can be made more active and improve student learning if instructors can follow some of our suggestions below.
1. Use mini lectures with purposeful active learning breakouts to improve student learning.
2. Effective and guided note-taking during lecture can improve learning.
3. Focusing on the essentials can improve student learning, and help students figure out what is essential can improve learning
4. Frequent quizzing and testing can improve learning
5. Paying attention to style and pace of speech can improve learning
We go into more details on each of these in the book as well as providing specific activities to help instructors achieve these goals. Ultimately, what is most important is that faculty take the time to intentionally design their classroom activities whether lecturing or another approach.
No teaching strategy is perfect.
However, by learning from research and proactively planning, instructors can improve their teaching and student learning.
