The End of Lecturing

A recent Harvard Magazine article focused on physics professor Eric Mazur who has gained national recognition for his abandonment of lecturing in his classes.

For many years in his freshmen physics class at Harvard, Mazur lectured to his class of 150 students, but more often than not found that his students (Harvard students, mind you) were not understanding, let alone applying, the basic content of physics and his course.

Like many teachers, he looked for logical explanations. "Maybe I have dumb students in my class. Maybe there's something wrong with the test." Eventually, however, he settled on the real culprit: his teaching style of lecturing was ineffectual pedagogy.

Rather than lecture, Mazur began using peer instruction where students share, discuss, clarify misperceptions, answer confusions.

While most elementary and middle school teachers use peer instruction, Mazur discovered that active learning, which includes explanation to others, is a better way to learn than listening passively to a teacher lecture.

As the article points out, the key to effective learning "is taking new information and applying it to real situations, connecting it with personal experience, projects, and goals, and taking personal ownership of it."

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the "flipped classroom" where teachers expose students to new content, concepts, etc. as homework and then devote classtime to understanding and using the content in projects and activities.

For Mazur, this reverse style of teaching has not been without controversy. "The general complaint (from my students) is that they have to do all the learning themselves. Rather than lecturing, I'm making them prepare for class--and in class, rather than telling them things, I'm asking them questions."

A truism for most teachers is "the person who learns the most in any classroom in the teacher." For me, I didn't really learn the rules of English grammar until I had to teach them in front of a class.

In a previous blog I referenced a study from 1997 about how people best learn:
     -We remember 10% of what we read
     -We remember 20% of what we hear
     -We remember 30% of what we see
     -We remember 50% of what we see and hear
     -We remember 70% of what we say
     -We remember 90% of what we do and say

Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers details that the necessity of practice in attaining proficiency.

And what better way to practice than to work with others on a project or to help someone who is confused about a concept.

Mazur is on a crusade to minimize lecturing in education. "The danger with lucid lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners. Sitting passively and taking notes is not a way of learning, yet lectures are 99 percent of how we teach."

For Mazur, "learning is ultimately a social experience" where interaction and give and take among student are paramount.

Mazur also has quantitative data to support his ideas. He has kept data on his students for the past 20 years and through peer instruction his students'  conceptual understanding of physics is three time better and their long-term retention of factual knowledge has improved significantly.

We're still long way from eliminating the lecture from schools, yet more and more educators (and parents) are moving away from lecture as the preferred and fall-back method of teaching.