I am afraid to admit that my favourite classes when I was an undergrad were those in the lecture format. These were the ones where you would come in, the lights would go down dramatically, or even off, and the slides would appear on the screen. Even before college, in high school it was the story tellers who would be the ones whose classes were the most exciting for me. The history teacher who taught the 1920s and 30s one quarter and the World Wars the second one, whose classes I ended up in for a semester because my eye strain made looking at the mimeographed course material for the AP class impossible, was one of the two teachers whose classes still shape what I do and read in my spare time (the other was my Shakespeare teacher, and who didn't love that class?).
So when I attend conference sessions or read articles (that are really diatribes) about how students cannot listen to someone talk for more than 20 minutes before we have to break things up with a video or make them stop and talk to each other about an issue, or that "flipped" classrooms where you have students watch a video of you lecturing from their dorm rooms and then they come to the classroom to talk with each other about the things you showed them when they were elsewhere, it drives me crazy.
Below the orange julius loopy thingy is a bit of my own commentary on lectures.
Lectures should not be boring, and they should be engaging. But they are not in and of themselves a bad way to communicate information. This is one of the conversations I have been having with colleagues at the conference I am attending this week (second of three before mid March, plus a one-day one at my own university, one that will focus on university issues, including teaching methods). We realize that we are not the complete audience for our classes, that very few of our students will go on to pursue our subjects after the BA, or even after taking one of our classes.
But "they" keep telling us that we should be looking at building not just knowledge but also skills, that students should have transferable outcomes such as writing, critical thinking and speaking abilities, analytical abilities and numeracy, and so on. Shouldn't the ability to sit politely and quietly listen to someone for more than 20 minutes be a skill as well? And to get something from listening? I realize they have short attention spans (we continually are told this, and when I have time I can look up data, but I am sure I have read articles and books with numbers attached, that show our students' cannot follow something longer than 15-20 minutes without zoning out). And they are used to watching videos and checking their phones and surfing the internet every ten or fifteen minutes. But is this something we simply accept? Or is it something that perhaps we should ask them to set aside? Isn't following a complicated narrative being relayed orally an important skill?
And yes, I know that some people cannot lecture their way out of a paper bag. I have had those people too. I had the professor who was not completely sober at 11 in the morning, and was rather aggressive when someone asked a question. I had the teacher for whose class none of us could take coherent notes and we ended up forming a study group where we used different non-class resources to try to make heads or tails out of the narrative we were being asked to understand. But a teacher who can tell jokes to liven up the classroom and make a story riveting should not constantly be told you are doing it wrong. Just because a student doesn't, when left on his or her own, spend more than 20 minutes doing a single thing, should we cater to that? Should all faculty set a timer at the front of the room and change activities three times an hour?
I think the thing that is frustrating me is that we are playing down to our students' current abilities and not challenging them. That challenge is not just in knowledge and process but methods too. I am certainly not advocating for complete 1930s style lectures from bored and boring professors. I hope I am not boring, and I do have discussion, quizzes, "pose like a statue" activities and so forth. But often I do lecture. For 45 minutes straight. And I don't let student have phones or computers in class, or do homework for other classes (or at least not visibly). I suppose they are in a way a captive audience, but I do firmly believe that they should be involved in the class, not needing me to be taking commercial breaks every ten minutes, or having them do a writing exercise every 20.
I am an old fogey. And I love listening to people tell stories.
What is the longest time you think students should be asked to sit and listen to a lecture and take notes? What do you think makes a lecturer worth hearing?
(I am off listening to sometimes exciting and sometimes sadly dull lecturers today at a conference, but will check in when I can -- talk amongst yourselves!)