This week's article summary is Been To a Good Lecture?
My previous school was very progressive: it emphasized the process of learning over the final product; gave students ample voice and choice over what they learned, when they learned it, and how they demonstrated their understanding of it; and employed active, experiential, problem-based activities.
I arrived at the school with much more experience in and familiarity with traditional teaching: lecture, textbooks, note-taking, tests, and research papers. Anything I had done that could be considered progressive was accidental and more a result of an intuitive sense that kids learn better when engaged in what they’re learning.
So in my first year as Middle School Director, I spent as much time as I could observing classes to see progressive teaching in action.
Of all the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade teachers I observed, by far the most popular was the school’s eighth grade history teacher: the kids loved her, worked and laughed hard in her class, and learned much content. Whenever I visited her classroom, I was equally mesmerized by her narrative tales about American history.
The problem: all she did every day was sit in the front of the classroom and talk. She was the classic sage on the stage. Her typical class was 97% teacher talk, 3% student-to-teacher talk, 0% student-to-student talk.
Imagine my surprise: a funky, progressive school with its most popular and effective teacher violating every precept of John Dewey’s child-centered pedagogy upon which the school had been founded in 1922.
Just from observing her in the classroom I learned a lot about teaching:
- One teaching method does not fit all teachers
- Essential to student learning is teacher engagement with their students, not the pedagogy the teacher employs
- To optimize learning, teachers first need to earn the trust of their students by creating an emotionally safe and comfortable classroom
- All of us, including kids, love to learn from hearing stories
So, is lecture bad pedagogy? Is hands-on learning preferable?
It all depends on the teacher.
Joe
------
It’s hard to avoid telling students things that we think they need to know. Thus, the lecture.
Unfortunately, evidence suggests lectures are not a useful way to improve learning. In fact, the effect size of lectures is negative. Three meta-analyses of lectures have focused on a comparison between a lecture and active learning or innovative teaching—and the lectures fare worse.
But we’ve been to good lectures. We’ve been challenged and entertained by a lecturer. Our curiosity has been piqued and our critical thinking has been provoked by someone standing in front of the room sharing information. Thus, there must be some good that can come from a lecture.
So, perhaps this is a case of a false dichotomy. Maybe lectures, done well, can be active and innovative.
What students don’t need is an information dump. Simply regurgitating information students could have read or watched on video doesn’t constitute a good lecture.
Students benefit from the following characteristics in lectures:
Presentation Skills:
- Is knowledgeable, current, and accurate in the subject
- Uses relevant and meaningful examples
- Verbally fluent in public speaking
Mode of Lecture:
- Paces lecture so students can take notes
- Provides summaries during the lecture
Motivation:
- Arouses curiosity and interest in audience
- Uses inclusive examples
- Uses non-biased language
Modeling:
• Shows enthusiasm for topic and audience
Critical Thinking:
- Encourages independence in learning
- Challenges audience’s views to prompt critical reasoning
Cognitive Processes:
- Clearly structures the lecture
- Builds on audience’s knowledge
- Pauses for students to consolidate their thinking
Effective lecturers model expert thinking, tell compelling stories that illuminate concepts, and share experiences that provide context and insight.
Accessibility and interactivity are key to effective presentations of information. By accessibility, we mean that the content must be relevant to students, understandable to them, and designed to build on existing knowledge while stretching them to consider new ideas.
The interactive nature of the lecture is equally important. It is designed with motivation in mind and considers students’ learning needs, such as posing questions, pausing for notetaking, and providing opportunities for reflection.
Time—including both pace and length—is another important aspect of a good lecture. A pace of about 100 words per minute generates higher levels of comprehension, and students perceive the information to be more valuable, compared to more typical speaking rates of 150 to 200 words per minute.
For length, the focus should be on the ways students are asked to recall and retrieve information: When lectures are interspersed with opportunities to practice and apply information, interact with peers, and retrieve information from their minds, the overall length of time spent in the lecture is less relevant.
Good lecturers often asks the audience to interact with the material by making annotations and asking questions. They speak for brief amounts of time, then pause to allow the audience to discuss the content with one another in small groups and collaboratively generate ideas about an idea or concept.
While there are both good and bad examples of lectures, it’s unlikely that lectures will be eliminated from the educational landscape. So, we need to focus on how to improve these learning experiences. Importantly, lectures should be integrated into other learning experiences in class. Lectures can be effective as part of the gradual release of responsibility, with other instructional experiences planned as part of the overall lesson for students.
By viewing lectures as one component of learning, not the sole way of learning, we can build students’ capacity to pay attention and receive information in this format. Emphasizing interactivity, pacing, and frequent opportunities for retrieval and practice can change the effectiveness of lectures.
No comments:
Post a Comment