Don’t lecture me

I think what you say in your final para Harry is absolutely right, and explains the stubborn resistance of so many of our colleagues to these ideas.

(Having said that, I suspect that many British educated academics, even including those who now promote the importance of the lecture, hardly attended any themselves. I went to all those in my first week as an PPE undergrad at Oxford, decided they were a waste of time, and stopped going. Most of my peers did likewise and I’ve given more lectures in that university than I ever listened to.)

explains the stubborn resistance of so many of our colleagues to these ideas

That, and the whole meta-labour of rethinking & reworking not what you do but how you do it, which is difficult, stressful and time-consuming. (Everyone who does it says it’s tremendously rewarding when you get it, admittedly – but so does everyone who does est or becomes a born-again Christian.) I’ll think about it, though. Just not right now.

Very interesting piece. Some random thoughts.

1) Mazur is bang on when he says “That’s the irony of becoming an expert in your field. It becomes not easier to teach, it becomes harder to teach because you’re unaware of the conceptual difficulties of a beginning learner.” I find I teach worse, or am in danger of teaching worse, the more I’ve thought about a subject, because I’m now more interested in details that are beyond what the students are ready to think about. And I think this blows up the common faculty association argument that there’s no conflict between research and teaching because the best researchers make the best teachers. Balls!

2) The suggestion that if lecturing is all there is, you should have faculty do it once, put it on the web, and then fire them is like the suggestion that once there’s recorded music or Youtube videos, no one will go to live concerts. Not true. There’s something in the personal connection with a performer at a concert that’s deeply attractive. Similarly, a presentation by a live person in a room infects the material with his personality and his love of the subject in a way even a web presentation of the same material would have a harder time doing.

3) Mazur’s specific teaching method seems harder to apply in a field like philosophy, where there aren’t single correct answers to questions that you can count the percentage of the class that are working toward.

4) I often associate philosophical ideas with pop song lyrics, and sing the relevant bits to my classes during lectures. (Mackie’s idea of “objective prescriptivity? “To know, know, know him/Is to love, love, love him.”) It’s the most (positively) commented on feature of my classes in evaluations.

Anyway, time to think about how to do it all better.

this was always one of my problems in lower-level core classes in university, and one of the reasons i dropped out.

there were some lecture classes (i fondly remember both biology and anatomy) in which the lecture presented no new material- everything was in the textbook, everything was rote memorization. there was no attendance policy. i finished both classes with close to 100% for the final grade.

unfortunately there were others in which same deal: lecturer basically reading the textbook/study handout/transparencies aloud. attendance was required and monitored. i didn’t do so well.

please, don’t force me to fake two hours of rapt attention listening to things i can read in 45 minutes. present new material, encourage participation, do something. this was all in the time before smartphones, of course. being able to text my way through such a class would have made it so much more bearable.

Thanks for this, Harry. I’m intrigued by the thought of having students prepare and present peer lectures. I have a few questions about details of how you do it — e.g. How detailed or prescriptive are you in guiding students’ preparations for the lecture? A lot of extra background reading involved? Or just a focus on careful analysis and exploration of the course text and questions/issues arising?

Would you be willing to share more details about your ‘method’ here?

Thanks!

I actually worked as a teaching assistant for a class co-taught by Mazur for a few semesters. But it was back when he was just starting to experiment with this stuff, and it was a mostly traditional lecture/section arrangement (and since it was the electromagnetism semester, and the class was mostly pre-meds who didn’t want to be there, it was a very tough sell). It’d be interesting to go back and see where he’s gone with this.

Anderson:

Because I am required by the University to give a two hour lecture for each class each week. Office hours are in addition to not instead of teaching. Many students have asked me to write out my lectures so they don’t have to attend lectures or do the assigned reading, but I have refused. University is not supposed to be easy. If we are going to become a ‘world class university’ as is the official goal of the administration then students are going to have to attend lectures and do the assigned readings or fail the classes. Or at least the ones in my classes have to meet these requirements. I can not speak for all the faculty in the university.

Louis: They have to think as well to answer the exams. But, they are not going to have any facts to support their argument if they don’t first attend lectures and do the assigned readings. I have no idea what goes on in the US. But, if you can miss all your lectures and still get into law school they are not doing it right.

Teaching methods that force greater engagement from them (and are objectively better for them) may well be resented for just this reason.

I have the scars to support that conjecture. ;)

Harry. Thanks! This is an interesting post. And guilt-inducing too!

I have always thought that running a good seminar is MUCH more difficult than lecturing. My problem is that I am impatient. This is not so much with undergraduates but with grad students. But both seem unable to engage in much active thought in class (some may be too embarassed to appear bright and curious – that’s not cool!). But I recently read an interview with Diane Ravitch in which she speculated on the imapact of student thought processes of having endured a decade or more of standardized test taking (and the teaching styles aimed at enhancing performance on such tests). So it may be that they are not educated to do the difficult thinking.

In graduate seminars, the equilibrium outcome is that the student asked to present over -prepares and offers a plodding summary/recapitulation of the material while everyone else under-prepares and has nothing to contribute. (My strategy has been to induce another equilibrium by pulling names from a hat on the day of the seminar. The hope is that that will induce everyone to prepare some.)

None of this is a defense of lecturing other than to say that it is easier.

Relatedly, in the Physics department at MIT, nearly all of the introductory courses have been converted to TEAL format:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/13physics.html
http://web.mit.edu/edtech/casestudies/teal.html

I like what I’ve seen of it as a TA. It is a cliche, but nonetheless true, that the only way to learn physics is by working on problems. For a lecture-heavy course, a fraction of students will have both the motivation and resources (time, friends in the class, etc.) to perfect their problem sets. The rest will do a half-assed job and cram for the exams, especially if the psets are only 20% of the grade (as is typical.) Accordingly, their exam answers will issue from pattern recognition and repetition, not genuine understanding — hence the complaints when a novel and therefore “unfair” problem is given.

Ditto the last para and Chris’ first comment — I think many of us who ended up in academia figured out as kids how to teach ourselves: a course just provided a framework and a challenge.

My dad, who taught math and astronomy, made the same switch around the same time that Mazur did, possibly in response to the same research. One of the things that convinced him to change was looking at a sample of students’ lecture notes. The argument for lecturing hinges on the quality of note-taking.

I do class observations for colleagues from time to time, something I cannot recommend too highly if you teach. It’s a way to learn new techniques but it also gives you the sobering experience of sitting in a student’s seat for two hours. The “more fun” bit is exactly right: if you only perform, you forget what it’s like to be in the audience.

So I do a lot of structured small-group work, often with handouts: a short presentation from me, then some task where they have to think and talk, then some discussion. The challenge of getting small groups to do good work, to which subdox alludes, is real. But it can be met!

Because I am required by the University to give a two hour lecture for each class each week.

I think that’s a good point, and a likely problem for profs who try to break the lecture hegemony.

… Btw, Woolf was well ahead of the research:

Why, since life holds only so many hours, waste one of them on being lectured? Why, since printing presses have been invented these many centuries, should he not have printed his lecture instead of speaking it? Then, by the fire in winter, or under an apple tree in summer, it could have been read, thought over, discussed; the difficult ideas pondered, the argument debated. It could have been thickened and stiffened. There would have been no need of those repetitions and dilutions with which lectures have to be watered down and brightened up, so as to attract the attention of a miscellaneous audience too apt to think about noses and chins, women sneezing and the longevity of flies.

At a previous institution I saw good evidence that students were downloading podcasts of their lectures, and positive feedback for the service. I’m a bit cautious of comments such as Chris’s and Steve’s @16 and 17 which imply a positive virtue in not giving students what they want. The whole idea of timetabling learning seems a bit problematic, to put it mildly, so that ‘objectively better’ methods of doing it still may not be very good.

Of course there is only so much flexibility you can actually afford in your delivery, given constraints on resources, but lectures seem to be quite cheap so I would have thought they still have a place alongside other methods which may suit other students better.

I’m a bit cautious of comments such as Chris’s and Steve’s @16 and 17 which imply a positive virtue in not giving students what they want.

When what they want is to memorize, regurgitate and forget without making any effort to understand, then there’s a hell of a lot of virtue in not giving them that.

i’m no academic. see above: i dropped out. but christ – a lecture should have at least some value that makes the lecture worth attending. if the material covered isn’t anything different than the reading material (even worse, if it’s just reading the reading material aloud), why bother? dully droning on is not improved by asking for questions every half hour or so.

granted, at least in my experience, a lot of the lecture classes i attended could simply be eliminated or made half-semester or something. when the only grading in the class is attendance + a scantron test every five weeks + a fill-in-the-blank final… maybe the class is actually worthless. prepare for it or not at your leisure and take it like an SAT/ACT.

maybe i should have gone to a small liberal arts college.

I wrestle with the “to lecture, or not to lecture” question every year. I teach a large (200 person, with the room-size cap) sophomore-level course. The topic is one on which virtually every student has deeply held priors, usually based on ideology/politics rather than on data. I have one TA, making discussion sections or labor-intensive weekly assignments (e.g., reading response papers) logistically untenable. This year’s student: TA ratio is a bit of an outlier, but not far off my running average of 125 students per TA.*

I have looked into various methods for promulgating discussion in large courses, but haven’t yet struck on one that would be effective in overcoming the “blind-leading-the-blind” problem. For example, whenever I’ve tried asking students to explain concepts to each other in pairs (per Felder and Brent), the majority of pairs just reinforce each others’ priors. The most viable options, then, seem to be to (a) lecture, or (b) cap the course at roughly 1/8th of its current size, which defeats one of my main goals in teaching the course at this level. So, I lecture.

* I teach in a reasonably well-resourced private institution in the US. Alas, teaching assistants are not allocated to departments on the basis of undergraduate enrollments or external funding, but on the basis of inter-departmental politics. No candidate for dean would survive if s/he didn’t promise to maintain the size of the graduate programs of departments that shall not be named, but whose publicly stated justification for their large graduate programs is that “otherwise, no one would take the classes that our faculty want to teach.”

The only maths I ever absorbed, I absorbed from watching worked examples being worked, with an accompanying meta-narrative from a teacher….

Whats the ‘worked example’ of history? Of philosophy? And is that anything like a lecture?

Steve @29
I’d lay money that pretty much none of your students actively wants to ‘memorize, regurgitate and forget without making any effort to understand’. Perhaps that’s what they need to do in order to jump through a hoop some of them feel the need to jump through. So ISTM you have chosen to describe their motivations in a way which deliberately obscures the motivations and belittles the students. Cause for caution.

Andrew, in all your comments here you have yet to demonstrate the slightest understanding that teaching is supposed to lead to learning. Cause for a LOT of caution. I’m with Chris, only I think he was being quite fair and possibly not even cynical enough.

In the UK do lecturers or professors get any training in teaching? I certainly never got this impression, teaching quality seemed pretty random to me. There was one professor who was a nice guy and very intelligent but would go off on a tangent and lose most of the class, you would have to wait for the seminar to ask about points you were uncertain on. Other seminars were a waste of time and just went over the same things covered in lectures and very little discussion was created. Often students had to present in groups in seminars and this could work quite well, especially when the presentation was graded and the mark made a small percentage of your overall grade. You quickly worked out which lectures and seminars were worth attending, the most important seminars were the ones where you decide who would be in your group.

I did my first degree ant Northumbria, a new university, then did some EFL teaching and after that went to Newcastle, a Russell Group university, to do my MA. At Newcastle the format was typically 2 hour sessions in small groups with a professor doing a presentation, a break, then more input or discussions from the students. I found the discussions to be good but the presentations from other students to be worse than at Northumbria. I think this was because you weren’t graded on the presentations so people would just produce notes and read them out, basically a mini lecture, as this is how they had been taught at university.

You’ve got to remember people have come straight from school where they probably haven’t been used to or wanted to take part in class discussions, I always liked to but I think I’m unusual in that respect. So you need some support, structure and encouragement to encourage good student participation and to do that staff need teacher training. I f they do get it in the UK I’m concerned about the quality. I remember in many seminars the professor asking a question on the spot and not getting a response, students need to be given time to consider an answer and need to understand why they are being given tasks to do. Discussing something in a small group then coming back together for full class feedback is great but you need to care about the topic or understand why it’s important. I think the problem is the assumption that the lecturer’s job is only to give the students information and it is the student’s job to internalise it but the result is just wasting a lot of people’s time.

I’d lay money that pretty much none of your students actively wants to ‘memorize, regurgitate and forget without making any effort to understand’.

Andrew’s experience with undergraduates sounds a bit rarefied.

“Why, since printing presses have been invented these many centuries, should he not have printed his lecture instead of speaking it? “

The answer is because many lectures are not intended to be one-directional broadcasts of static information. In mathematical subjects (including computer science, physics, and mainstream economics), lecturers usually aim, firstly, to direct the attention of the audience members to mental models of concepts, models which may be represented by visual images or even by 3-dimensional objects, and lecturers usually aim, secondly, to have the audience members reason about these mental models – in real time, in their own heads, in the lecture room here and now, simultaneously with the giving of the lecture. To achieve these two aims usually requires a subtle interplay of concatenated, parallel, and interleaved efforts to direct the attentions of the audience – from what the lecturer is saying, to what s/he or she is now drawing, back to what s/he said or is now saying, again to what is being pointed at on the visual (or other) image, back to what is now being said, which may be an implication or consequence inferred from that part of the model which has been revealed so far, back to what is now being further drawn, and so on. Such communication is rarely unidirectional, because the lecturer needs feedback from the audience so as to adjust the specific combination of attention-direction-efforts appropriately to the specific reactions of the audience members to make clear what s/he intends to convey. This is why, for instance, so few game theory textbooks actually explain the semantics of the diagrams the theory uses, leaving it to students to acquire that knowledge from a lecturer or from other students (eg, what,precisely, do those arrows mean in game trees?). Ditto for many mathematics textbooks, apart from those in category theory.

Most people strongly pushing video transmission of lectures do not comprehend the intense sublety of communications here – with on-the-fly combination of multiple, diverse communicative acts – and are operating from (or, at least, act as if they are operating from) a very impoverished model of what actually happens in lectures.

The answer is because many lectures are not intended to be one-directional broadcasts of static information.

this isn’t the case in my experience – then again, i went to a large state school of only middling reputation. then again, it could be my idea of a lecture class is the “pack 200 people into a room/scantron tests/no essays necessary” class. it’s not really required to bellyfeel why beethoven is from the classical period and wagner the romantic; it’s just more facts to cough up at the appropriate time.

of course memorize and regurgitate falls apart immediately with even something as simple as remedial algebra that requires one to not only know rules but also be able to apply them.

I found it impossible to learn just about anything from lectures.

I confess that I seldom attended any lecture in college or law school where it was possible to get somebody’s notes. Fortunately (or unfortunately) many law school classes lectures were so unvarying from year to year (including the same little jokes and asides) that very detailed lecture notes were passed down from class to class. I used to feel guilty for attending few lectures, but I am getting over that.

In a similar vein, I never took any mathematics after high school. Actually, I signed up for some classes and went to the first couple of lectures and was just absolutely lost. Might have well been taught in Farsi. But I have started working my way through Khan Academy mathematics “lectures” and they are fascinating.

peterv that doesn’t sound like the lectures I attended when studying natural sciences (focusing on physics).

Certainly when learning foundational material at the start of my course the quality of the lectures were largely irrelevant to how well I would come to understand the concepts. It seemed to mostly be a function of how well written the course material was, the quality of the recommended textbooks and to a lesser extent the quality of the supervisions.

Chris@36. I apologise for not responding in my 37 which I must have been drafting while you posted. I am sure your cynicsm is justified and would not dream of commenting on your fairness or otherwise.

But my own experience is that sometimes students want to learn in deep ways and sometimes they just want a qualification. This depends on their goals and priorities at the time, not some essential difference in their characters. My PhD is in medieval military history but I also have plenty of certificates in coaching, equality & diversity awareness, health and safety for managers and the like and I bet you too have learnt many things out of necessity rather than interest. I’m not advocating the importance of qualifications and credentials in today’s labour market or the role of university education in class formation – far from it – but blaming the students for it seems a bit rich.

And Steve @39, my point was simply that whilst teaching may be supposed to lead to learning in practice learning, particularly deep and insightful learning, can’t really be planned for and delivered to any schedule. Lots of other people on this thread have said the same thing in different words. That doesn’t mean I’m somehow opposed to teaching.

Back in the 19th century when I was a college freshman one of the history lecturers became a legend by falling asleep during his own lecture.

Oxford classics in the good old days was an endless source of stories about bad and unconcerned lecturing — I believe one fellow once delivered his lecture even though no one had shown up, and another famously lectured to one guy for a whole term who had been assigned to report back to his fellow students if anything worth mentioning ever happened. (It didn’t.)

On the other hand, I have heard that German classicists and ancient historians gave better and more serious lectures, perhaps because they were typically working up the lectures into books. (I heard particularly strong admiration for Wolfgang Schadewalt, perhaps unfortunate given his political antics.) Can anyone say if German lecturing is in general stronger than the Anglo-American variety, or is that some sort of urban legend.

Oh man, easily the most dispiriting thing to read while taking a break from preparing lectures!

As others have mentioned though, it’s awfully hard to move away from a lecture model when you’re teaching an intro course to 150 or more students in a giant auditorium type setting. (When teaching smaller classes, I’ve had no trouble getting students to engage in fruitful discussions.) I find that it’s just much harder to get students to talk or engage in a discussion. There can be really basic problems, e.g., in these auditoriums students often can’t see or hear someone sitting far away.

On the question of whether lectures can or should add anything to what’s present in the readings, I think a lot depends on the subject/content of the course. Say, e.g., that I’m teaching Hobbes in a class where 80% of the students have never had a philosophy course before. Even the most diligent student who reads the text carefully is going to have relatively little idea what the hell to make of the text. And in a situation like this, I’ve found the most helpful thing to be to clearly and patiently explain what the argument is supposed to be — this shouldn’t be the only thing one does in lecture, but it is I think the most important.

Steve@54
I don’t want to derail this thread, having done that to a previous thread and regretted it. Let me therefore offer my apologies for the offence I have clearly caused you in my posts @37 and 27, which were unduly personalised. I should either have found a more appropriate way of making the points I thought I had, or shut up.

@58: I certainly will not deny that I could probably teach large classes better, and in less lecture oriented fashion, than I maybe do. But here again, the difference between subjects might prove crucial. I might be assigned TAs for a course who themselves have little to no familiarity with the texts I have assigned (or, say I’m teaching Intro to Political Philosophy, and one or more of the TAs has little prior knowledge of political philosophy) — I’ve certainly had to TA classes in the past where I hadn’t read the majority of the texts assigned. In this situation, I can’t really rely on the TAs to take on something like the primary instructor role (which anyway seems kind of unfair to the TAs — maybe I’m misunderstanding your point?).

Look, I’d much rather never have to teach one of these classes. I’ve taught the same type of intro classes (indeed, the same intro classes at the same institution) that were 30 or so students, with no TAs. You interact with students differently, the students interact with each other differently, it’s worlds better (though I’m sure you already know this). But as long as I am required to teach intro classes to 150+ students, I have a really hard time seeing how I move away from a primarily lecture based model — though, again, this may well be a failure of my imagination.

Harry @62,

That’s quite helpful actually, and you did mention something like this in the post above. I still hesitate, in part because often students can’t hear each other very well in some of these rooms, but certainly one could somewhat get around this by asking the students to speak louder, etc. In any case, I would like to try new things, and this seems worth a try. Cheers.

often students can’t hear each other very well in some of these rooms, but certainly one could somewhat get around this by asking the students to speak louder, etc.

What about a hand-held microphone (or two) that is passed around? (That should be doable — many universities have technology assistance offices, don’t they, which could doubtless work that out. It’s pretty low-tech, after all.)

64 and Andrew Fisher

Of course most students want a qualification. It’s much easier. And with the obvious caveat that what is and what should be are often very different, universities should always be about learning things in deep ways, and never about a qualification. Schools that offer nothing but a qualification are simply trade schools.

In the early 70’s i attended Santa Barbara j.c . My Philo prof, Dr. Peter Angles, required students to prepare and present at least part of the lectures in Symbolic Logic. He said it was the Socratic method. I believe that experience, that active learning, gave me the confidence to do what I found was most necessary, subsequently, at Cal. That is, learn on my own. This was most true in my Physics classes, as the nominal lecturer was often not the guy in front of the class, but rather a T.A. Later, in my professional life, I found the experience just as valuable when I taught entry level engineers various stages of semiconductor manufacturing. And I too gave Socrates the credit.

There is no one best approach, and there are subjects for which lectures are perfectly appropriate.

For example, I teach astronomy. A lot of what we’re doing involves the equivalent of storytelling – for example, answering questions like “how do we know there is a giant black hole at the center of the galaxy?” It’s storytelling informed by physics, but the lecture mode for topics like this works very well. Other subjects benefit, of course, from different methods. But to assert that one should never prepare a lecture on any topic is just silly.

Another matter is that teaching is very much an individual art; methods that fail in some hands work well in others.

Assuming that content is there, the most useful thing a “lecturer” can do, IMHO, is to convey that:

1. the “lecture” is not the truth/unchallengeable/the only way to get “credit”,
2. challenges, questions, honest diversions will not cost the students in an informal setting (during the lecture), and will be considered fairly in a formal one (exams) – most good lecturers welcome these challenges,
3. thinking about the content critically is as important as accepting it as “established”

Of course, convincing resistant students of these points is difficult – their intellectual curiosity is often underdeveloped or has been quashed by experience or concern for the competition for position that higher education too often involves. And sometimes what looks like “authority” needs to be wielded to correct errors (and then, of course, students will say “but you told us to think for ourselves!”).

The point made that some students progress better from reading material than from attending lectures or vice versa is a valid one – I never feel offended by students who do well without attending my lectures (though I feel occasionally that they are depriving their fellow students, as they are usually ones who could contribute to the lecture experience).

Self-selection: I agree completely. I found the process of writing down what the speaker is saying, and then retranscribing/typing up the notes at the end of the term to study was always the most effective for me. I am a very fast writer and can write down almost everything the professor says (some things are condensed or skipped, naturally). Just the physical process of listening and writing at the same time helps me remember things. So I found lectures interesting and useful.

Very interesting thread. I teach high school history so I find this very relevant.

They told me in teachers college in the early 90’s that lecture was among the least effective teaching strategies but once I left uni I found the practice overwhelmingly established in high school humanities teaching. The main reasons I surmised, were ease of preparation and class control and probably simple instructor conservatism.

This is very interesting. My 20 odd year experience lecturing at the University level has taught me a few things, however, that stand in direct contradiction to this (I teach Computer Science and Math).

It is my job to distill the material and present it, not read from Power Point slides, or follow the book. The book is the supplemental material for reference. My students generally have very little knowledge of the subjects (think about your first programming class or calculus classes on average) or blocks to learning them. I am there to break down those blocks. I present in a variety of ways so that people who are written learners can take notes, as well as visual, etc learners can thrive. I try to be entertaining.

Interesting point: those people who take the first semester of a sequence online, and then have me live nearly always drop out or do very, very poorly. Why? Well, most people aren’t equipped to deal with the unstructured way of learning that online classes presents. They need the reinforcement of peers, the different perspectives of the professor and the structured learning a lecture schedule provides. Generally they come in very, very weak even if their online grade was good.

I am intrigued about asking students to prepare lectures and will try that. But I think this is a novelty…we did it in business school a lot and, frankly, I can’t tell you much about those lectures/presentations but I certainly remember vividly the lectures my International Business professor gave. He was that good. Same for other professors years after I had them. I can practically recite their interesting lectures (I had a history professor that was so good years later I can remember the concepts and events in Elizabethan England). So not sure of the value of this study.

I doubt your propsoal would work for mathematical subjects, except perhaps in the first lecture of a first year class.

This past semester (in a fledgling ‘mathematics for the social sciences’ trial course) I spent the first couple class periods for each topic on a more informal group “motivation” discussion, in which we opened a problem, tried to reason out a solution or guestimate off the top of our heads, and then thought through the circumstances under which our estimate could fail us.

Most interesting insight gleamed from this: Math students are used to solving math problems, not solving non-math problems using math. Anticipate significant recalcitrance and disorientation if you try to goad them into doing the latter. An example exchange (paraphrased somewhat):

Student. “The book gives us a formula. Are you seriously saying we won’t get credit if we use the formula from the book to get the answer?”

(note — I am not saying this, and it doesn’t make much sense in context; we’re not even seeking a numerical answer.)

Me. “What do you mean, what answer?”

S. “The answer to the problem on the board.”

(note — I’m aware that there is no formula in the book that would directly or indirectly provide the answer to the question on the board, though there are a couple common-sense answers that will do perfectly fine.)

Me. “Okay, so, what are we trying to find, and which formula do you want to use?”

Student sighs. “Can’t you tell us?”

For the upcoming semester I plan to start giving entirely pre-conceptual quizzes. Not even quizzes on mechanics, or conceptual quizzes on the presented material. Pre-conceptual quizzes that check for understanding of (1) what we’re even trying to accomplish in the first place and (2) what the common-sense answer is in simple cases and (3) under what circumstances the common-sense answer might fail us and thus (4) why we need more sophisticated or elegant or precise tools in the first place.

Hi,

Most schools at every level are organized to collect as much money as often and quickly as possible, distribute that money throughout the hierarchy, and then control the behavior of the victims. For a lucky few, actual learning is an accidental by-product. For most of us, that model has long been broken.

Manual skills, for example, are necessarily, best, and most effectively learned “hands-on”. Intellectual skills are likewise, necessarily, best, and most effectively learned “brains-on”. Both of these imply a high degree of interactivity with the learning process and subject matter. If you’re lucky, you can finally get that in advanced degree programs.

Although it is obvious that some learning can occur in lecture halls, the one-way, broadcast-mode, of lectures has no way to assure that. For most of us, it usually fails. The process entirely depends on testing for those failures after the fact, and rewarding only those who have somehow avoided it.

This system is mainly designed by the schools to pluck the goose in such a way as to elicit the minimum number of squawks. Anyone who “teaches” in it needs to understand that doing it any other way will be at great risk to the career.

I’m not pretending to be superior to anyone here. When I taught, I lectured. Shame on me.

Have a nice day!
Antti

peterv-

I’m not convinced. I’ve used Harry’s method in a decision and game theory class – not exactly math, but partially a math class, and it works well. I divide the students up about once a week in the lecture, and they work collectively on a problem set. It might require some practice to find just the right sort of problem, but the better students in the group often deepen their understanding of the mathematics by having to explain it to someone who doesn’t get it.

As for groups “without a genius present” – they do better on the problems struggling as a group than alone. They’re more likely to ask questions, because the questions come “from the group”.

I encourage you to try it.

So, for those of you doing a lecture where you want students to ask questions and otherwise speak up sometimes, how do you go about doing that? I see the reluctance to outright refusal to speak in my peers (I’m an undergrad in American Studies) and I love to interact somewhat during lectures, as it’s the only way I can keep paying attention. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work when one other person at most is willing to ask a question, and I see that me being too willing to ask and answer questions discourages others from making the effort (which is incredibly frustrating because they know things I don’t and I learn more when they share and ask questions).

I know the culture of K-12 education in the US tends to actively discourage participatory learning in things in the lecture or lecture-ish format, and setting a tone and rhythm for interaction seems to be an important element, but have any of you developed any techniques for encouraging questions at the very least? I think encouraging engagement from a good number of students is the only way lectures are tolerable for me, and I think that’s true for others, and I feel you all are likely to know if it’s possible and how.

I always thought having to transcribe notes (which was the norm), was a particularly wasteful use of good braintime. I made it a point to NOT take notes, but to think and ask questions. The better teachers gave out copies of notes. One thing that is important to keep in mind, is that different people learn more effectively via different modes. For some, it is easy to remember that which they heard. For some it is easier to remember stuff that they read. For others still, they can remember what they’ve written. For the later group, the tradition lecture given to a class full of scribes might be the most efficient mechanism. Because of the large variation in learning styles, I would suggest that a diversity of presentation styles would reach the greatest number of students.

#91: “For some it is easier to remember stuff that they read. For others still, they can remember what they’ve written. For the later group, the tradition lecture given to a class full of scribes might be the most efficient mechanism. Because of the large variation in learning styles, I would suggest that a diversity of presentation styles would reach the greatest number of students.”

I’ve heard that diversity in learning claim followed by that diversity in teaching recommendation many times, or at least variants of that sequence. But if the first claim is correct, shouldn’t the teaching recommendation instead be: find methods to categorize the student into learning types and teach each group in the way that best fits that group. That’s often not feasible for a teacher “on the ground”. But shouldn’t that be aimed for at some other level (course design, university level, or even the national level).

As for lecturing as such I’ve always found that its purpose (in math anyway) isn’t to present more material than a book does, it’s to emphasize what’s important – what the crucial arguments are

This. Also, to see the *process* of argument; to watch someone cook, rather than just assemble a huge mass of recipes to read yet never attempt.

So, for those of you doing a lecture where you want students to ask questions and otherwise speak up sometimes, how do you go about doing that?

The strategy I employ [grad student, 101-level math classes, standardized material and format mostly outside my control, non-original idea stolen from some other folks]: Collect notecard answers from the whole class and spend time in that same class skimming through the cards for what seems most useful, call on a couple of those students, interact until their question is understood and answered. If students are recalcitrant, make some sort of ‘participation and attendance’ grade dependent on contributing something via notecards, even if they’re not called on (easier if you do attendance-by-signature, be generous assigning credit, and just sort out the few blank/incoherent/no-credit notecards as you sift through them according to whatever standard you want no-credit to mean).

Sometimes I solicit answers to a (broad) question, sometimes ask for student questions (the special point of the exercise versus a quiz is lost if I ask questions that have ‘correct’ computational answers, so I shy away from that). Usually the former is preferred by students who have a pretty good grasp of what we’re doing, and the latter is preferred by students who don’t, so I go for a 50-50 mix. If students don’t have a response, I ask them to make an observation instead, something they noticed or rephrased in their own head or whatever, or a conjecture about when or where this might be useful. Asking students to make guesses about potential applications usually results in data that helps me figure out how to introduce and motivate a topic better next time — it’s my favorite strategy for spot-checking for actual mastery of an idea and usually generates at least a couple of really cool thought-provoking responses.

During the time I spend standing there sifting, the students catch up with notes of whatever is written on the chalkboard. (Fellow math teachers who want to drive themselves crazy should try not ever speaking at any time when students are writing down chalkboard notes.)

In some classes, depending on atmosphere, I ask a question of the form “explain to me what I just told you.” It’s possibly the question requiring the least thinking, but it’s also useful to see if people literally heard what was said. I used to be very proud of myself when I said some super-perfect sentence that got the idea presented exactly right, without realizing that any sentence not written down is likely to be garbled by a huge number of listening students (an inherent consequence of any talky-talky lecture presentation format, not of students’ inattentiveness or negligence).

I try for a mix of open-ended questions and softer ‘gimme’ questions for morale-building purposes. At least a few times each semester I get such a bewildered mess of responses to some seems-simple-to-me question that I just back up and try to clarify and obtain sturdier footing before moving on (when this happens I try to note the general confusion somewhere, to better address next semester).

I don’t do this every day, and sometimes I don’t even go to class with a particular question in mind. It’s a very flexible tool. It also makes participation grade assignment easy and makes me comfortable assigning that a significant portion of the total course grade — I get useful feedback data and guidance about how to improve understanding, which is basically the main point of student participation, and students think they’re getting an easy A on a course component worth a whopping 10% of the grade, incognizant of just how much total work and effort they’ve put into the notecards. It’s also a halfway decent focusing tool — sometimes I design whole lectures around a good question I intend to ask.

This semester I’ll be asking a lot more pre-conceptual notecard questions, early into a topic, because I’m heartily sick of seeing half my class demonstrate they know how to try to do something without having any idea of what it is they’re trying to do.

In the super awesome future everyone will submit responses via tablet computer and it won’t be such a waste of paper.

I went to a very small liberal arts college (Haverford) 40 years ago where all the classes were small — I recall maybe 25 as the biggest I ever had. All teaching was essentially by seminar method, although the teacher would get the ball rolling. Most were face-to-face around a table. The place is bigger now than in 1970, but not much.

Then I went to medical school, where I suffered through the standard big lecture auditorium format, at least for the pre-clinical years. For the next couple of decades as a faculty member I had to give those lectures, year after year. (Med students in their clinical years are generally taught in small groups, or even individually.)

Here’s how I would judge the difference in the methods I experienced and perpetrated on my students. The culture of the small place, the small classes, was that each student genuinely felt some degree of ownership in how the class went. Not doing the reading would be instantly obvious to all, and no student wanted that kind of exposure. So, perhaps for the wrong reason (peer opinion), everybody took part. Lectures, those I sat through and the hundreds I gave, were mostly performer-spectator affairs. So, as has been suggested upthread, any teaching method that expects students to take an active part — gives them no way to opt out of that — is probably a good thing.