Is Lecturing Ever Justified in a College Course?

An exchange on the Professional & Organizational Development in Higher
Ed (POD, http://www.podnetwork.org/ <http://www.podnetwork.org/> )
listserv this week is given below. Are lectures ever justified today
and, if so, when and what kind of lecturing? I ask this as a gadfly,
knowing that statistics seem to indicate that, in spite of all the
research and changes in approaches to teaching, including the use of
technologies, somewhere between 75 - 90% of college faculty lecture
much/most/all of the time. In an ad hoc, unscientific student survey
that I asked some faculty give to their students this April, two results
are as follows, based upon 264 returned surveys:

       Q. 1. Estimate, over all semesters at Western, the percentage of
class time that professors lecture in your classes:
             Students Class time
                0% 0 - 25%
                8% 25 - 50%
               50% 50 - 75%
               42% 75 - 100%

        Q. 2. Estimate, over all semesters at Western, the percentage
of class time that you are actively engaged in classroom learning
activities (such as group work,
                 problem-based learning, giving presentations, in-class
writing, simulations, debates, discussions, role-playing, etc.):

                29% 0 - 25%
                45% 25 - 50%
                20% 50 - 75%
                 6% 75 - 100%

These surveys from classes in various disciplines say that for 92% of
students of their professors lecture 50 - 100% of the time and that
active learning activities are experienced in 50 - 100% of class time by
26% of students.

In 1799, Samuel Johnson said that "Lectures were once useful; but now
when all can read, and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary."

Is it time for the ending of lecturing as a method of teaching, or not?
In your own experiences, how does lecturing compare with other methods
regarding significant student learning outcomes (knowing that there are
different kinds of lecturing)? Why do you think so many faculty
continue to use lecturing as their preferred way to teach? What does
the scholarship of teaching and learning have to say about the best ways
to foster significant and enduring learning, as well as creative,
critical thinking and effective communication by students? What do you
think?
_________________________

I have often heard the statement that all forms of teaching have their
place, including lectures.

I would like citations to one or a few studies showing that an unbroken
50 minute lecture (one without teacher directed, student-student
interaction every 10 minutes or so) is EVER better for ANY learning goal
than any of the more active alternatives.

The question arises from my suspicion after careful reading of Dick
Hake's work that there may not be ANY learning goal for which unbroken
lecture can be justified. (In Hakes meta-analysis for Physics, no
lecturer, no matter how good, matched the average of alternative
approaches. But perhaps Physics is unusual in this regard?)

Thanks,
Craig
______________
Hi, Craig!

This is an interesting question that you have posed. I must confess that
I possess a similar bias to yours (implicit in your query below); that
is, I can hardly think of *any* situation in which the lecture is the
best learning method. In my "practice," I advocate "anything/everything
BUT"! Nevertheless I have stretched my brain and come up with two
possibly valid occasions for lecture:

        1. A highly specialized researcher (think medical research,
perhaps) who has absolutely up-to-the minute (as in *yesterday" or "this

        week") data which have come up so very recently that there is no
time to have printed it, planned a presentation/discussion, etc.

        2. A minister/priest/rabbi/guru/mullah preaching a sermon.

--Lynn S.
______________
Craig, and all,

While it isn't a 'study' per se, I am reminded of Parker Palmer's
section in Courage to Teach (pp. 21-25) where he discusses teaching
mentors, and lectures versus dialog or other active learning. I was
struck by his way of placing active pedagogical techniques and lectures
into the context of personal teaching style.

He says:

        "One of my most memorable mentors was a man who seemed to break
every "rule" of good teaching. He lectured at such length, and with such
enthusiasm, that he left little room for questions and comments.
Preoccupied with the world of thought, he listened poorly to students,
not because he disdained them but because he was so eager to teach them
by the only way he knew -- sharing his knowledge and passions. His
classes were mostly monologues, and his students rarely played any role
other than audience. He may sound like a pedagogical nightmare, but for
reasons I could not articulate at the time, I was powerfully drawn to
his teaching -- indeed, he changed my life."

Palmer goes on to describe a workshop in which he encounters 'Professor
X', a curmudgeonly and unpopular teacher; "For twenty years Professor X
had tried to imitate his mentor's way of teaching and being, and it had
been a disaster. He and his mentor were very different people, and X's
attempt to clone his mentor's style had distorted his own identity and
integrity.... Professor X's story gave me some insight into myself...
early in my career, I too, had tried to emulate my mentor with non-stop
lecturing, until I realized my students were even less enthralled by my
cheap imitation than some of my classmates had been by the genuine
original. I began to look for a way to teach that was more integral to
my own nature, a way that would have as much integrity for me as my
mentor's had for him -- for the key to my mentor's power was the
coherence between his method and himself."

What I hear in this is that pedagogical technique is ultimately less
important than finding my own style and lecturing with my own sense of
passion and purpose. My sense is that in a learner-centered environment,
the means by which learning occurs is less important than the fact that
learning occurs at all. Sometimes for me this means impassioned
lectures, sometimes it means group activities, and sometimes it means
dialog with the students. It rarely if ever means dogmatic adherence to
a set of 'best practices' based on someone else's style and
circumstances... So, I'd argue that lectures are justified whenever they
work. Of course, what constitutes 'working' is a whole other subject for
debate! But I suspect there are situations/teachers where lectures are
an equally effective means of creating learning.

Respectfully submitted,
 Teri B.
_______________________

Craig,

Dick is careful to point out that the evaluations he describes are about
the counter-intuitive concepts that are the meat and potatos of
introductory physics. These paradigm shifts call for the student to
reconstruct his or her understanding of some element of the world. But a
certain amount of education and training is more like Kuhn's 'normal'

science: the new knowledge slots neatly into the way the student already
thinks about the world. That's one reason why textbooks (a form of
one-way presentation) have survived.

My guess is that live, one-way lecture to 50-200 students is more likely
to be acceptably effective when a) the desired learning is 'normal'
rather than paradigm-shifting, b) there's some reason to adapt the
lecture to changing context (e.g., current events), and c) money is an
issue, as it always is. I agree that too many faculty rely on long,
uninterrupted live lectures. But there are probably still many
circumstances where such lectures are as good as the major alternatives
(lectures where the faculty member pauses every 5-10 minutes for
questions and brief discussion; textbooks, small group discussions led
by the student's peers or by adjuncts, recordings of lectures given by
other faculty at other times).

Nonetheless, as technology infrastructures develop, I'd predict several
kinds of enhanced live lectures will gain ground, lectures more able to
foster interactive engagement and deep learning:

A) lectures in which students are prompted to think deeply by being
asked to respond to conceptual questions. (This is a kind of class Hake
talks about.) Students respond by using some kind of personal response
systems (colored cardss, a 'button box,' a PDA, or laptop). A class of
several hundred students can be polled in seconds, and the pattern of
answers displayed for the faculty and the class to see. Used
appropriately, these systems can prompt intense small group discussion
and deep learning of concepts. For more on how to use personal response
systems this way, see this page on our web site:
<http://www.tltgroup.org/Facilities/Facilities_and_Activities/patterns.h
t>
http://www.tltgroup.org/Facilities/Facilities_and_Activities/patterns.ht
<http://www.tltgroup.org/Facilities/Facilities_and_Activities/patterns.h
tm> m

B) moderated 'chatroom style' conversations that go on during the
lecture to allow students to ask questions and pursue points when they
are unwilling to interrupt the flow of the lecture (something that
happens all too frequently in a class with 100 or more (often diffident)
students;

C) digital video recordings of the live lectures so that students can
review the lecture later, as often and whenever they need to;

D) note-taking software that allows the student, later on, to call up
chunks of the lecture linked to those notes taken during class.

Phil Long and I have just written an article on the classroom of the
future for the fall issue of EDUCAUSE Review. This is one of our topics:
the future of the lecture.

Steve Ehrmann
_____________________

Hi Steve and everyone else,

Textbooks allow the student to review and chunk info at her own speed so
any parallel to lectures may fail.

I agree that personal response systems can be used to make lectures more
effective and interactive--although the same can be done with at least
moderate success by using student groups for brief disucssions(plus
holding up hands).

Note most centrally, however, that my original request only used Dick as
an example and asked for any STUDIES (actual data) in which an
uninterrupted lecture beat(let me now say even ties) ANY more active
pedagogy when used with actual students.

Through the years, I have heard lots of guesses and opinions suggesting
that there MIGHT BE goals and lecture methods (e.g. careful application
of learning cycles and learning-style theory by an unusually
scintillating lecturer) in which a continuous lecture MIGHT BE as
effective or even better than more active alternatives.

Does any one know of any actual data that EVEN ONE lecturer good enough
to beat the competition actually exists in any discipline?

Perhaps we need to seek out a few really effective lecturers and
document what makes their teaching work (or show, as in Physics, that
renown lecturers are only more entertaining, not more effective at
producing actual learning)? And before you say entertaining and
motivating are good ends too--let me agree but posit that it may not
take 50 minutes to max out the effect (see again Hake).

I hope I am not pursuing this too directly--but it seems clear (at least
to me) that it really matters. Given the effort I put into decades of
well organized, entertaining, visually enlivened lectures I can assure
you that I would prefer strong evidence for the efffectiveness of at
least someone's lectures. If you know of any, please give me a hand.

Thanks. Craig

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Received on Tue Jun 28 10:15:12 2005