Comments on: Lecturing is Dead?

By: Digito Society » In Defense of the Lecture

Digito Society » In Defense of the Lecture — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 02:48:35 +0000

[...] Defense of the Lecture Filed under: Academia — REK @ 9:48 pm Here are one and two nice defenses of the lecture. I agree, lecture is sometimes the most effective [...]

By: Digito Society » In Defense of the Lecture

Digito Society » In Defense of the Lecture — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 02:48:19 +0000

[...] Defense of the Lecture Filed under: General — REK @ 9:48 pm Here are one and two nice defenses of the lecture. I agree, lecture is sometimes the most effective [...]

By: screw the pooch

screw the pooch — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 21:17:12 +0000

I am a public school teacher who has been educated in both the U.S. and the U.K. I’ve attended, at various times, several different universities. Basically, it boils down to whether or not you have prepared students and whether or not the professor likes his or her subject matter enough and is charismatic enough to pull off a lecture. I have had some brilliant lecturers and some horrible seminars. Likewise, I have had truly poor lecturers and some wonderful seminars.
I think they should be used in tandem. Getting rid of one to favor another pedagogy reduces the means by which information can be disseminated; this is to be avoided at all costs.
I suppose you could sum it up thus: good lectures are useful and have their place, seminars are useful and have their place.

By: Nicholas Weininger

Nicholas Weininger — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 16:22:44 +0000

Catherine Liu: I went to the original Harkness Table school, and the instructors there wouldn’t be so passionate about the method if it didn’t work. Also, it’s a bit strange to accuse a bunch of prep school teachers of being populist or anti-intellectual!

By: chris

chris — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 03:10:03 +0000

1) As a friend said to me, “You passed Trusts? Why the fuck did I stay awake?”

2) The weight given to the term “good” in “good lecturers are valuable” is evidenced by the efforts to universities take in selecting for it, training for it, and giving promotion credits for it (0,0 and 0, respectively)

3) let’s not forget the practical reasons for having a lecture theatre rather than videos; it is
(a) one frail tool against having 300,000 linguistics students taught by the same person, thus creating something like 25,000 PhJobs
(b) a reason for the existence of university campuses, adjacent to good coffeeshops
(c) an argument for paying large sums to go to university rather than staying home, reading the textbooks, and then presenting yourself for examination, as in ancient China. Which I have always thought a superior model.

By: clew

clew — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:45:53 +0000

I can handle either underpreparation or unmotivation, but not both at once. (And I only tutor.)
In physics and history, you can at least tempt people with explosions and murders; “at the end of this section we blow things up!”
I was struck some posts ago by a comment about the lecturer peering into the dark to see the students; I’ve been in very few lectures in a dark room since high-school; my (mostly v. good) lecturers clearly scan us for a sense of following/disbelieving/leaping ahead/bewildered. Of course a lecturer is going to do worse when the students are invisible. It’s another argument against filmstrips/Powerpoint, in my biassed opinion.

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:33:05 +0000

Well, that problem won’t go away as long as 4 year colleges corruptly covet tuition money and / or enrollment-based state aid from students who really need a couple of years in a good community college to get them up to speed.

By: Moebius Stripper

Moebius Stripper — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:24:44 +0000

Steve Labonne – the best method I can think of is to start with the junior-high-level material they should know by now, and teach it slowly, in an interactive way, over the span of several years. When given three months to teach that group, divine intervention is probably the only hope.

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:06:49 +0000

Is there a good format for teaching seriously unprepared, unmotivated students? Somehow I think class format is the least of the problems…

By: Moebius Stripper

Moebius Stripper — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:13:00 +0000

The lecture format is beyond limited. There are much more effective ways to teach/learn math (which I teach), and I’d love to implement one in my classrooms. I’d do so in a heartbeat in my precalculus class if I weren’t required to deliver four chapters’ worth of material in three months, let alone to a class of students who are five grade levels behind the level of my class and who would rather poke their eyes out than think about math. My students have recently been giving me comments about how I should “be more interactive”. I do allow for interaction within the lecture format, pausing frequently in the middle of the material I present to prompt them for the next step. About 90% of the time I am met with silence.
In terms of efficiency, the lecture format wins. Every step I take to engage the students slows down the pace of the class. There’s only so much leeway I have when I’m not the one who sets the curriculum. In one of the first-year classes I teach, if I were to run the class with groupwork and discussion – assuming my students were motivated, which they’re not in the slightest – I’d be lucky if I got through a third of the course.

By: Steve LaBonne

Steve LaBonne — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:01:16 +0000

“Lectures can easily become a dialogue, where Q and A can occur in both directions between students and teachers.” This is a key point. At small colleges like the one where I taught in a previous life, even lower-division science classes are small enough (70 or so being a “large” enrollment) to allow a considerable amount of this, and it really helps to keep the students from zoning out. Given that I knew this and applied the knowledge as best I could, the educationist claptrap about the inherent evilness of lectures used to irritate the hell out of me. But I imagine it’s a lot harder to do in a class of 500.

By: Mr. Name to you

Mr. Name to you — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:46:12 +0000

I think Keith Ellis pretty much misses the point and simply scuttles what could be an interesting topic, at least for academics. McLemee does a nice job reasserting the value of lecturing. And in my mind, the more fruitful way to go would be to explore how to make the lecture format work – what’s required to do it well. Lectures won’t go away for both practical reasons – classrooms are a numbers game – and pedagogical reasons – there’s something valuable in attending good lectures. An alternative path would be to explore how we’ve managed to ruin what could be a productive way of teaching. For faculty, teaching load and classroom body counts certainly militate against good teaching, regardless of style and format. But the faux-authority of educationists also become just so tiresome.
I think the claim Ellis makes about the superiority of seminars and a discussion format can be easily dispensed with since he largely contrasts the strengths of seminar teaching with the more blatant weaknesses of lectures. But most of that contrast melts away if you consider that what makes a seminar format work so well is the same thing that can make a lecture shine as well: motivated and knowledgable students and teachers. If either party is lacking, then the classroom and resulting interaction will collapse into the stereotypes with which advocates of each format present to make their cases. Students know well how to fake it – boredom, sleeping, idle day dreaming, etc. are not uncommon in seminars. In both cases, the classroom is a staged performance and both the master of ceremonies and the audience can figure out how to phone it in.
And lets not play fast and loose with what these formats involve: a seminar can easily involved extended forays into lecturing – explaining points, providing context, background and lectures can easily become a dialogue, where Q and A can occur in both directions between students and teachers.
Evangelists for discussion like Ellis are every bit the pompous ass as their curmudgeonly know-it-all kin lording over the class room from the podium. They’re tolerable nuisances in the department until they find themselves in positions of authority. Then they become meddlesome fucks.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 04:25:38 +0000

Oh, and I think Sean will back me up on this, but it's astonishing how much more effective teaching math and science in a seminar setting can be than in a lecture setting. In fact, difficult, technical topics are well suited to a seminar...which is of course why grad school is mostly seminars. In a lecture, a difficult idea will often present an immediate and unresolvable roadblock for many students. They not only will fail to understand that idea, they'll likely miss much of what follows, as well. I'd like to add one more thing. Of course the best students do well in a seminar setting. But it's my observation that mediocre students do well, too. I think the biggest reason for this isn't so much directly about how people learn as it is simply about viewing one's education as something one is a part of, not a passive acceptance of information from a teacher. Mediocre students who have been passive all their lives are suddenly taken seriously. They're expected to think about these things and demonstrate that they're thinking about these things. Peer pressure shames them into doing so, and success at doing so gives them pride in themselves. (And, if not, it becomes apparent to everyone early on that they should probably be doing something else.) Finally, I'll admit the real necessity for lectures: given that it's not feasible to replace all lectures with seminars, the alternatives (I listed) to lecturing leaves a great deal to a student's self-discipline. And, frankly, that's not going to work. In a very cynical view of contemporary university education, one might say that lectures are necessary and prevalent because it's just about the only thing that you can get students to (mostly) reliably do. I don't know if that's a defense.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 04:00:47 +0000

I have attended a good lecture or three, occasionally even in a classroom.
Mine is a pragmatic argument. Part of what Scott and others here are complaining against is (I think) just another educational fad cooked up by someone at an education school who’s sure that they’re the first person to have discovered/created the most effective pedagogy. I share that complaint. I also agree that people vary considerably with regard to what teaching style is most effective for them and thus, ideally, we’d figure out what that is for each student and provide it.
But we’re talking about, really, contemporary universities and colleges with limited resources and poor to mediocre students. How best to teach them? Well, I don’t think it’s the lecture format. None of the defenses above are persuasive to me.
If students are inclined to be lazy, it will be much more evident in the seminar than the lecture hall. Immediately evident, which will make the student subject to peer pressure. If you don’t want to somehow engage the lazy students or shame them into working, but rather get rid of them, there are better ways to do that than lecturing or discussion.
A complaint about seminars is that they can be derailed by irrelevancies or just bad will. That’s true. Of course, it’s a teacher’s job to control that. In contrast, when you’re up there lecturing, aside from squinting into the lights to see if people are alseep, you can’t do anything at that time to detect and solve problems. In a seminar, topics that a teacher thinks are relatively trivial and will gloss over in a lecture often are suprisingly difficult for many students—but you figure that out and help them.
JennyD wrote, “Remember, WE are supposed to be TEACHING students”. Yes, and the best teaching is interactive. We know this, it’s intuitive. When your child comes to you with a question, you don’t have him/her sit patiently while you lecture them on everything they should know about the topic for twenty minutes. (I hope not, anyway.) You interact with them. This interaction is important for many reasons, but one of them is that learning itself is active, and people learn more quickly and more permanently when they are an active part of the process.
But aside from that, it’s not the case that many lecturers are really teaching that much, anyway. We live in a mostly textbook world, people. 90% of all lectures are a summary of the chapter that the students will read, presumably, later, with a few thoughts of the lecturer’s thrown in. If a teacher is truly the author of the material, and if they have a particularly engaging and effective speaking manner, then a lecture format makes a lot of sense. But that’s a tiny minority of university lectures.
I’d like to repeat: my argument is threefold. First, in general I’m arguing that discussion, in general, is better pedagogy than lecturing. Second, I’m arguing that lecturing is more effective in only a small number of exceptional cases and which does not include most contemporary university classes. Third, given the previous point, whatever is being accomplished via a lecture in most cases can be better achieved via some althernative lecture-like format (not necessarily discussion). A videotape, a reading that would otherwise have been a lecture, whatever. Because it’s a lot of damn trouble to get a bunch of students and a teacher in the same room at the same time. If you’re not utilizing that opportunity for something to which it’s suited, it’s wasted effort.
I just can’t get beyond the sense that a large portion of the instinct to defend lecturing isn’t pragmatic at all, but rather about prestige.

By: Michael Palaeologus

Michael Palaeologus — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:44:30 +0000

Nah, you see the thing is, crap lecturer – you JUST DON”T GO - whereas in the seminar type course where students do much of the presenting, there is a sense of civic responsibility and plain courtesy to show up with your fellow students.