If most students think a technique/class/subject/education is boring why are we prepared to accept that?

http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/

But if we don’t lecture, how do we get all students to learn the same curriculum, and how do we test if we have no assurance students have actually been exposed to all of the material? Well, as I have argued in a previous post, there is no guarantee that students have been exposed to all of the material in a lecture: often students are far behind the lecturer and miss key points.

Instead, I think it makes more sense to have the actual curriculum problem-driven rather than reading-driven: we organize the material, think of some problems to assign, and let the students use office hours, books, and each other to get through the material. Lectures, when used, can be devoted to speaking about much more general and/or interesting material, with no expectation that all students will get every point from the lecture. From what I have read of his Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman was such a lecturer.

The only caveat is that if the material necessary to solve the problems is not available in lecture, it is only logical that it should be available someplace else (like a textbook). Of course, a good text or library seems necessary for any class regardless of lecture component.

These lectures stood out for many reasons. The first and most obvious was that the professors at Carnegie Mellon had clearly put a lot of thought into the content of design of their lectures and at all points knew what they were talking about and what they were going to say next. This is the basic standard for a good lecture; most people are knowledgeable on the topics they discuss. The professors at CMU, however, did not make the assumption that their knowledge guarantees a good lecture. Rather, they took the time to prepare their notes and powerpoint slides ahead of time, and actually draft their lecture in detail.

What was truly outstanding about the CMU lectures, however, was the clever and thorough ways they integrated technology into the lecture. All supplementary materials that the professors prepared, such as powerpoint slides, were available digitally before the lecture so students could follow along or take notes on their computers. Anything the professor wrote down by hand was also captured and posted on the course website after the lecture. In addition, the lecture was taped and posted, so students could watch the confusing parts of the lecture over again.

In short, these lectures served both of the purposes I outlined in the previous post. The students would attend lecture to hear the professor introduce the topic, then go back and re-listen to the lecture to actually master the difficult problems. In fact, I think students got more out of the lecture the first time around because they didn’t feel as much pressure to absorb it all.

I think this style of learning is oddly similar to lecture: it’s a combination of trying to read concise and commonly abbreviated text (be it on a technical webpage or on a blackboard) and simultaneously hear and react to any words that are spoken.

Here’s the  insight: lecture is intrinsically very very hard.

The biggest reason for this is that oftentimes, lecture is pushed into the background, ranked somewhere behind compulsively decoding what is on the blackboard, and perhaps copying it down.  Many good lecturers know that they should pause, after writing a key point on the board, but pausing for long enough for every person in the room to take it all in takes too long.

Having to copy the blackboard by hand will certainly slow the process down even further. Attempts have been made to assuage this problem; a commonly used technique now is the use of power point. The slides are printed out for the listeners before the presentation, so that they need not copy by hand. This can help.

The bigger problem, however, is that both on power point and on blackboard speakers commonly choose to use very concise language. This is done in the interest of time and space, and overall is arguably the best decision. However, if something in the reading is vague or unclear, there is simply no time to remedy that before the lecture progresses, and the speaker makes another point.

At this point, there are three clear options: one can ask that the lecture be paused and the point explained, or one can ignore the confusing part and try to continue listening, or one can stop paying attention to the lecture. Sometimes the choice to stop paying attention to the lecture is not even conscious: one simply gets caught up in a point, and does not hear the next few sentences.

So is lecture effective? I think it can be, if it’s short and motivated. I think lectures can be – and generally are – used to introduce new concepts. This may be OK – although it’s a very time consuming introduction – but I don’t believe the listeners actually learn very much during these lectures; if they’re lucky, they’ll get an idea of what they’re supposed to learn on their own!

Another way to use lecture is to lecture after the material has already been introduced through reading or homework. This sort of lecture can be more effective because the motivation for hearing the lecture already exists, and so there is hope that the listeners are paying more attention. In addition, the fact that the lecture recaps material that should already be somewhat familiar helps mitigate the conflict between listening and understanding. However, this is still an inherent conflict for many listeners.

Perhaps the best one can accomplish in lecture is to convery some meta-points: this is useful, this is accessible, you should go home and learn this! I wonder how much more students learn if they are at ease with the idea of learning.

The timing seems right to start this now. At the moment I am teaching three intensive five week Chemistry and Physics courses for Upward Bound. Even  I have never considered a career as a teacher, since I would like to sudy education I felt it was important for me to gain field experience outside of tutoring, and teaching summer school has been an extremely rewarding experience in that regard. I believe I have a lot of ideas and observations, and  I am excited to share some of them in this space.