Lecturing is Dead?

My classical history professor (who later scandalized that nation on 9/11, but that’s a separate story) was famous for his lectures, not least for breaking down in tears while describing the battle of Thermopylae and, especially, the death of Alexander. Three hundred undergrads every Tuesday and Thursday and never did a soul fall asleep.

I note that McLemee explicitly ridicules a book by giving it a false title, and that this false title implicitly ridicules a book he otherwise does not mention, but whose ghost haunts his whole discussion: Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

If preparing for and giving a lecture is such a learning experience, why not structure a class so that it is the students who give lectures, not the designated instructor?

As something of a postscript to a period of work with a trade union representing university academics, I wrote that the appropriate response to declining per-student funding ought be resisting the proliferation of ‘seminar’ classes (20-30 students, discussion style) and instead returning to a lecture/tutorial mode, with lectures to very large groups, and tutorials geared to the learning needs of students at different stages (viz. early on teaching them learning habits, and later on substantive consideration of specific disciplinary material).

Of course, to achieve net workload reductions, it requires the willingness to make bold curriculum decisions (in order to subject large numbers of students to a small number of lectures).

The most radical form of anti-lecture pedagogy that I have ever come across was the Harkness Table method that was tried upon a group of teachers by prep school instructors who were fanatical about the method.

We had to do a reading and then discuss it around a seminar table while the instructor sat back and took notes on how the discussion. The idea was that we “would teach other the material.”

I found the format much more coercive, much more surveilled as it were than the lecture format. The readings that each person offered were not in the least instructive to me. I would have preferred an expert give me a dazzling lecture, but I have been reading Hofstadter on American anti-intellectualism recently and am struck by own this continues the populist American suspicion of the “specialist.”

I learned something from this format though — when I get a question during a lecture, I often pause and let another student answer it. Some one does pipe up eventually — and in a productive way, and then I move on.

Stupidity is a dangerous accusation — one that Flaubert has an uncanny way of rebounding on the source.

No particular technique of pedagogy is more vulnerable to stupidity than any other — its the fanatical reform-minded types who tell us that lectures are dead that I thought McLemee was condemning .

Keith–
reparse Catherine’s claim as
“no particular technique of pedagogy is uniquely invulnerable to stupidity”
and I think she’s right. No change of medium will completely finesse the need for good teaching.

Example: videotapes will presumably be videotapes *of* something, no? And videotapes of really bad, crashingly boring teaching will have no particular pedagogical advantage over really bad, crashingly boring lectures, I shouldn’t think.

keith ellis —
I think, at risk of flame that no one will even bother to watch as it extinguishes itself, that you are confusing “irresponsible lecturer” with principle of lecturing, per se. It is a truism that many professors (though fewer than are accused) sleepwalk through their teaching duties… of course, the question is: how many students sleepwalk through their learning responsibilities? I would argue that the latter far outnumber the former, and that the impetus behind the “discuss not lecture” movement feeds itself far more from laziness on the part of both parties than it does from a question of social justice.

Keith,
I suspect I know which school you went to. I attended a school that was similar in many ways. But if you’re saying that every class where the format was discussion was superior to a lecture, I don’t believe you. I’ve sat through appallingly directionless seminar meetings where the amount of information or even worthwhile thought could have been produced, by a decent teacher, in a quarter of the time actually spent.
Undoubtedly such skills as learning how to debate, how to criticize one’s own thoughts on the fly, etc. are better developed in seminar. But not every class has to be part of developing that skill. Perhaps my imagination is lacking, but I cannot see how an introductory science course could be improved by turning it into a seminar.
Also, you’ve not fully addressed the problem of seminar students who can’t be bothered to read the material, for whatever reason, and are silent deadweight in class–a high enough proportion of those students and a seminar turns into something creepy; and worse, the students who haven’t read the material or haven’t bothered thinking about it and nonetheless feel free to take part, frequently slowing or derailing the discussion. A good lecture rewards those students willing to pay attention; the dross is minimized. Your statement that the lecture is most appropriate for the stupid and lazy is incorrect, unless you mean solely as a method for a university to garner more money per unit of its effort. Getting something out of lectures requires active listening; just because you may not be able to interrupt the lecture to ask for clarification or further defense of a point doesn’t mean you don’t have the opportunity or responsibility to look it up later and figure it out for yourself.

Is Ellis writing funny material or what!? I mean really, here’s a guy who doesn’t know jack about the lecture, who’s never experienced a good lecture and therefore is drawing on a rather one-sided exposure to it lecturing the world on the flaws, deficiencies, drawbacks, and just plain don’t likes of the lecture. And this ass is doing it in the most condenscending way, using a dismissive tone, feigning a tired detachment to the topic and basically farting itself into cyberspace. Discuss that, slick.
Ellis is pretty much exhibit A for self-refutation. There’s a pragmatic middle ground lurking somewhere but it’b been banished. Smug educationists have discovered the one true way to democratize the classroom. But this democracy, this definition of active learning is just so much bullshit concealing an organization agenda. Its education as fast food. Its quick, convenient, the crap hits all the obvious sensors indicating it tasts good and the user feels full. Its the appearance of learning. The activities and levelling result in fewer consumer complaints – which in itself is a measure of good teaching. And in so doing our intrepid learning mediators have secured sinecure and authority largely by conning the world into thinking that the mindless chatter of consumer students fulfills the role, goals, objectives of the ed-biz. That one correct way isn’t so much discussion mode classrooms as the imposition of multi-method teaching modes that turn classrooms into corporate training seminars outputting little drones who have had an “experience” and thus feel fufilled and so their ego’s remain buff and at the same time the classroom learning facilitator can provide the necessary documentation to satisfy their organizational objectives.
Oh, organisms like Ellis are just so loathesome.

I run one of the discussion sections out of a large lecture, and I have to say that the paired format–90 minutes of lecture Monday, followed by 90 minutes of discussion Wednesday–is a terrific way to run a class. Best of both worlds.
What’s astonishing is that students have to write weekly reflections on the readings, discussion, whatever. And they write often about the lecture. They are listening. They think about what’s said. And then they get a chance to respond.
Ellis doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Remember, WE are supposed to be TEACHING students. The requires a transmitting some knowledge to them for their future intellectual disgestion. Why is a lecture somehow bad for students, while making them read an author’s book (again, one-way method of transmitting information) a good thing?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!