My thoughts, as faculty, on #LectureFail

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked,

Is it time for more widespread reform of college teaching?

This series explores the state of the college lecture, and how technologies point to new models of undergraduate education.

Last month, we began inviting students across the countries to fire up their Web cameras or camera-phones to send us video commentaries about whether lectures work for them.

Chronicle.com/LectureFail displays a number of student comments, including a compilation, along with several faculty responses.

As a faculty member, as I watched several of the videos, I found my beliefs and attitudes to be more in line with the students than my faculty colleagues.  Personally, lectures are boring… for me… as a faculty member. I don’t like them, and pedagogically and historically, I find them to be an outmoded approach to teaching and learning. Why?

One caveat before a few thoughts… As I read/watch comments, I did interpret the question of #lecturefail to focus on learning experiences/courses which rely heavily or exclusively on lecture.  It does not seem that students are commenting on nor faculty are defending a moderate use of lecture as a learning tool.  The comments from both groups do not suggest a class in which a 30 minute lecture is followed by 30 minutes of discussion or project work, or a course experience that includes a lecture or two to support a 3 hour field experience; all comments seem to suggest a course which is entirely lecture based.

First, historically.  At the very least, lectures serve a once-relevant but now obsolete purpose: to disseminate information and knowledge.  Dating back at least to medieval universities, the purpose of the lecture was to convey information from an original source to learners; there was ONE paper source of a particular text, so the professor read from the text and learners took notes – transcribing their own copy.  That purpose and function of the lecture was, at least, diminished with the advent of the printing press, and with the development of the internet and the ubiquitous availability of and access to information, it is entirely  unnecessary to disseminate information to learners.  They already have access to more information than can be consumed in a lifetime.  The range of available technologies makes more than a few traditional classroom learning methods obsolete, and in some cases, inconsistent with established and accepted theories and practices of teaching and learning.

Second, pedagogically.  I have firm beliefs regarding what constitutes effective teaching and learning; it can be defined explicitly and succinctly. Those beliefs are based on a thorough knowledge of learning theory and practice gained through my own teaching and classroom experiences – as a professor and as a student.  I do not believe a lecture inherently precludes an active, collaborative and authentic learning experience, but I believe it may certainly inhibit it.

For a lecture to be a meaningful and effective learning experience, students must have the ability and habits of a scholar’s mind to engage the content; they must be able independently to engage the lecture by actively processing new information, by relating and applying concepts to situations relevant to their academic or future professional career, by choosing to engage classmates or others in the learning process.  If they do not possess those skills, a lecture ends up being a very passive, solitary and uniquely academic experience – everything that is NOT effective teaching and learning.  Is it a 18-21 year old undergraduate student’s fault if they do not yet possess the habits or skills of a scholar?  It could be; there are certainly students that just don’t care and don’t make the effort.  However, a lecture focused on content does nothing to model, instruct or otherwise facilitate learners engaging a scholarly process of interacting with and applying new knowledge.  If a learner does not possess the meta-cognitive awareness to manage and direct their own learning experience during and following a lecture, that is not their failure alone.

My own experience was that I did not fully develop my own meta-cognitive awareness until I was several years into my graduate career; looking back, I had started engaging lectures more independently during the last year or two of my undergraduate education, but I was not fully aware of what I was doing or the process in which I was engaging.  During those times though, I was working with and learning from faculty that were deliberately teaching scholarly, academic habits of mind; they weren’t just delivering content.  Given that experience, I believe fewer undergraduate learners than faculty think or believe have progressed far enough into their academic careers to be fully prepared to make a lecture the learning experience it could be.  Further complicating the issue, perhaps, is that faculty DO possess the skills for a lecture to be truly and deeply meaningful, so the lecture, as an instructional tool, seems much more effective than it actually may be.

Professionally and personally, I’d prefer to assume that most of my undergraduate students have not yet had an opportunity to fully develop the requisite skills to learn actively, collaboratively, and authentically from a lecture.  For me, methods other than lecture are much more likely to facilitate an active, collaborative and authentic learning experience.  I believe other methods are more likely to be effective even though a lecture is much less work, on my part, than designing, developing, implementing and effectively facilitating an active, collaborative, and authentic learning experience for my students.