Quit Picking on Lectures
BrainBased Learning, Teaching Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
“Lecturing is a bad teaching practice, would you agree?”
I not only agreed but challenged my fellow soon to be teachers to break the evil chains of a world of teacher-centered, direct instruction hungry educators driving students to boredom with their buckets of wisdom waiting to be poured.
After years in the classroom and recent administrative experience, I now realize I was wrong and have spent nearly ten years picking on the lecture strategy. It isn’t bad; it isn’t the problem.
How teachers employ the strategy is the real problem, the real black eye. After all, if we changed lecture to the title preso, TED Talk, podcast, or keynote, we wouldn’t pick on it as much as we do.
So, I beg of you: stop picking on lecturing and start helping teachers to more effectively utilize the strategy.
Cognitive Guidance vs Information Push
Recently, my colleague Ms Bitter and I presented a workshop on Presenting Sticky Ideas that focused on effective design and delivery strategies that provided cognitive guidance instead of pushing information upon students, the actual problem with lecturing that has given it an evil name.
This work to shift their approach from traditional content push to cognitive guidance centered on the following questions: How can the design and delivery of lectures using cognitive theory create engaging learning opportunities for students? How can our presentations improve in creating experiences that allow for collaboration and communication instead of shutting these down?
I believe the answer is yes when presentations are designed with an eye towards cognition and delivery is structured so that the learning is active and social:
- Backchannels
- Engagement Strategies: Question Strategies, (trans)Formative Assessment including such items as Poll Everywhere and Clickers like Senteos, Think-Pair-Share, quick writes, and discussions
- Balance of Left and Right Brain
- Various delivery styles (all under 20 minutes): microlectures, pecha kucha, Kawasaki method, TED style, etc.
- Visual-based slide decks that leverage cognitive theory in the design
- Utilize effective lecture capture strategies to create a learning space independent of time, space, place, and size
So, I ask: is lecturing a problem or the implementation of the method? If it is the implementation, what do we need to do to assist teachers in better applying the strategy?
Related posts:
- It isn't Just the Internet
- NCTE Keeps Rollin'
- MP3s and Homework
- Citizendium — the new, improved Wikipedia
- The Birds Will Be Singing
Short URL: http://www.ryanbretag.com/blog/?p=994
Great points here, Ryan. Your point on ‘implementation’ seems to fit well in many other contexts, too. I’ve seen some educators who taught in a very socratic manner and did it well while the same strategy did not work for a colleague down the hall. Yet another data point to consider is the number of teachers each one of us had that taught primarily via lecture. If this wasn’t the case in secondary schools, I’m guessing undergraduate courses are prime candidates for slide show presentations. Did we “learn” from these teachers? Did we learn better from some of them because of their implementation of the lecturing skill? Probably so.
Yes! It’s definitely not anything inherent in the lecture itself–people have learned via lectures, storytelling, anecdotes, for many thousands of years. Think of how recently written information became widely accessible to humans. But so few of us have been taught how to be effective speakers/storytellers. I submitted a few more non-written assignments in my school library media program than I did in my anthropology masters program, but only a handful. And the only people who took the storytelling class were people who wanted to work with small children (usually public librarians, as the school library program allowed for almost no electives). So it’s no wonder that so many educators who have been taught to present info via written format in their own educational experiences basically teach as if they’re presenting written info–too dense, too much, too boring for aural learning (and worse yet, sometimes accompanied by text-dense awful powerpoint). So your point about the importance of creating a learning space independent of time/space/place is well-taken. The ability to go back over info would really facilitate lecturing in many cases, imo.
I’m not convinced, Ryan. Some of us are great lecturers, and some are not. Your implementation strategies are wonderful, but I think many people are not self-aware enough to know if they are engaging or not. I would also argue that even if you are a dynamic speaker, the form of presenting lends itself to the notion that the teacher has all the answers, and the students’ responsibility is to simply absorb the knowledge. Despite all my study of what makes a good presentation (and I love your slide show, btw), I don’t present well. I teach best in small groups, discussions, one on one, and hands on. I know that about myself. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a great lecture now and again (especially in small doses, and especially one that incorporates storytelling and anecdotes as your other commenters have said). But no matter how great the presentation, it’s still one person doing all the work, isn’t it? Ok, here’s my compromise: I will agree that in small doses and on occasion AND following your guidelines, a great presentation can be effective.
Thanks for sharing your slides!
Hi Susan:
I actually think we agree but I never placed those specific points in my original post:
1. Not everyone can be great at lecturing but I believe we can enhance people’s use of the method. However, like any method, it is rarely wise to utilize the strategy day in and day out. I was not great at lecturing but was/am excellent at facilitating discussions. Did I use discussions every day? No. Did I use lecture? Yep — I gave minilessons, presentations, and minitalks (I just couldn’t get myself to call it a lecture). What I found was I never would be a great lecture but the I enhanced that strategy enough so that it was effective when I did find it wise to use.
2. I really like your point about self-awareness. It is so important to help others to realize the strategies they do well and those that they need to strengthen. I’ve had colleagues challenge me and say “why — let them do what they do well”. My answer is that you need diverse array of strategies, so you can’t follow the “good to great” model. To your point, we need to help there and draw out strengths/weaknesses. Easier said than done, eh?
Where we disagree is your notion that the speaker does all the work and has all the answers. I don’t believe that is cognitive guidance. I believe that is information delivery. I used lecture as cognitive guidance where the students did the work, debated the ideas, and established a foundation to go deeper.
It takes work but I know I continued to subscribe to the students should be applying more intellectual sweat than me.
The big question is whether those that have found lecture to be their primary teaching methodology (something I don’t agree with) are willing to adjust their conceptual understanding of lecturing so that it is about cognitive guidance and ideas not pouring content.
Great thoughts and thanks for the challenge.
Ryan, yes. The notion of cognitive guidance is far different from information delivery. I appreciate your thoughts here, and I am continuing to rethink my original reaction.
Matt:
It would be interesting to explore the strategies of those considered effective teachers versus those considered ineffective in terms of those that used lecture frequently.
Your point about certain methods working for certain people is something I believe. The key, I suspect, is helping educators find what they are good at, what they can be better at, and what they simply aren’t capable of doing effectively. I would say that some could be good at certain methods but are unwilling to push themselves. Thus, this is where leadership plays such an instrumental role in fostering that innovative environment where risk-taking, modeling, and peer to peer work is a norm.
Thanks for the thoughts, Kris.
Historically, you are correct. Storytelling and oral communication are long standing means of intellectual and social growth. That is why it seems so important to be open to what is really the issue and work through those. Just think of how much improvement in student engagement and achievement could potentially occur from rectifying a method used by many.
And, it starts with a key point you raise: “it’s no wonder that so many educators who have been taught to present info via written format in their own educational experiences basically teach as if they’re presenting written info–too dense, too much, too boring for aural learning (and worse yet, sometimes accompanied by text-dense awful powerpoint)”.
What scares me is that we are assigning presentations to students (not teaching) and there only means of building such presentations is what they’ve seen from their teachers. Thus, the cycle continues!
We need to model more effective means — how many faculty meetings display this vary approach that you describe — and open the discussion about how lectures could be an effective methodology in the right situation if it is implemented with an eye towards cognitive guidance.
We read Presentation Zen as an admin team last year and I believe this was a start to such conversations. There is a lot to do but the conversation has to start.
Ryan,
I think you’ll find the first few paragraphs here:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/rubrics.htm
useful to your thoughts. Also right now, Dan Meyer is blogging a lot about his evolution of thought as a teacher. All good stuff and possibly fuel for where you are right now.
Enjoy.
Glenn:
I’m pretty sure I get what you are saying or what you are directing me to see. Thanks for the challenge and push to explore a potential different line in my thinking. Your read had and still has me thinking.
Should we continue to seek floats as Kohn calls them or should we simply say we are trying to fix something that is not fixable/valuable?
Simply put, I think there is value in the using lectures in the classroom and I’ve experienced a number of lectures that I’ve grown from as have many of the peers around me. At the same time, I’ve experienced many, many lectures that have left me on the sideline of the learning experience and quickly lost me.
In many ways, I could have written a similar post about facilitating discussions. I believe in that strategy and methodology but I’ve seen many classes that are not engaged and not facilitating student achievement. By working to develop a great depth and breadth with this approach, the classroom becomes more engaging and achievement rises (qualitatively and quantitatively). Because some teachers overuse it, don’t know how to use it, or use it poorly, I wouldn’t think of the enhancement to the method as a different float of the same float. I would say there is one float that teachers don’t know how to build, design and navigate.
Woo… done with the float
Thank goodness someone is saying this! Do we not want students to work with their strengths? Teachers should do the same. A gifted lecturer should feel free to go with that if that suits him, his students and his curriculum. Frankly, I hope students see a variety of teaching styles throughout their school day and that can include well-done lectures. Thanks for the tips to share to make a lecture style presentation better.
Hi Lisa:
That is an interesting point about diversity in experiences for students with the teaching styles. It seems we are heading down a path of a one box mentality for teaching and I am starting to wonder just how much of that is stemming from educational technologists.
Although delivering good lectures is a skill that every teacher should continually learn, no one lecture style can engage the interest or satisfy the needs of all students. And students themselves have the tech like enounce Myspeed that can make them speed up or slow down lectures they recorded.
The pressure on the teacher must be given on the content of the lecture itself and how they are able to translate the message into something that is relevant and timely today, not just the same old analogies.
Celina:
Thanks for commenting and adding to thoughts here.
Your opening line is reflective in most if not all instructional practices NOT just lecture. One key to effective learning environments continues to be having both a breadth and depth of strategies and methods that can be drawn from at any given moment to reach the diverse needs of students.
Is lecture (not in the way we know it but from a cognitive guidance perspective) one such approach? I say yes.
But you are correct about lecture or course capturing. In my slidedeck, you’ll see the WWW slide. Basically, I am a firm believer that we need to capture our course content especially discussions and lectures in a manner that allows learning to become independent of time, space, place, and size. There are recent research studies showing how student access to these files after attending class are showing improvements in quantifiable student achievement.
Again, thanks for the thoughts!