We all hear that traditional college lectures are on the way out. I don’t know the facts, but I’m told that they’re not nearly as “educational” as “active learning” experiences, in which students use computers or teach each other, or as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), in which a professor lectures online and the students take e-tests. There are presumably data that back up the inferiority of traditional lectures, although I don’t whether the newer learning experiences have been compared to, say, small humanities seminars.
I don’t have strong feelings about this, for if one method teaches students better than another, we should by all means use the best one. And of course MOOCs, like the one on genetics and evolution taught at Duke by my ex-student Mohamed Noor, have brought high-quality education to students who either aren’t near a college or don’t have the substantial dosh it takes to get a regular college education.
But in some ways I mourn the passing of the lecture. Yes, they may bore students, or not teach them what we want, but I suppose I’m being selfish in saying that I’ve always found a good lecture fascinating and entertaining, and, from behind the lectern, it’s simply great fun to try to bring your subject alive.
In Sunday’s New York Times, writer and professor Molly Worthen defended the traditional lecture in a piece called “Lecture me. Really.” It’s a spirited defense of tradition, but in the end the data will tell—and Worthen gives precious little data. What she does give, upfront, is a pretty transparent motivation for her defense:
But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the “sage on the stage” with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences — fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.
Now one could take this to mean that scientific demonstrations (i.e., surveys and data) showing that active learning trumps lectures are to be feared—in other words, a cry of “scientism.” But, so it seems, Worthen just feels that the humanities are different in how they get students to learn, and that learning humanities (Worthen teaches history) is best done by traditional lectures. Those lectures, she says, foster a set of skills unattainable by newer methods. What works for science education shouldn’t automatically be transferred to the humanities:
Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media. More and more of my colleagues are banning the use of laptops in their classrooms. They say that despite initial grumbling, students usually praise the policy by the end of the semester. “I think the students value a break from their multitasking lives,” Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and an award-winning teacher, told me. “The classroom is an unusual space for them to be in: Here’s a person talking about complicated ideas and challenging books and trying not to dumb them down, not playing for laughs, requiring 60 minutes of focused attention.”
I too banned laptops from my required evolution course, for I once watched from the back of the room when my co-teacher lectured, and observed that most students weren’t taking notes on their laptops, but reading email and playing on Facebook. Worthen continues:
. . . [Harvard President] Eliot was a chemist, so perhaps we should take his criticisms [of lectures] with a grain of salt. In the humanities, a good lecture class does just what Newman said: It keeps students’ minds in energetic and simultaneous action. And it teaches a rare skill in our smartphone-app-addled culture: the art of attention, the crucial first step in the “critical thinking” that educational theorists prize.
Fine. Where are the data? Or does Worthen, while abjuring the methods of science teaching, also abjure the need for empirical support of her views?
Worthen goes on to elaborate on the skills that a good lecture imparts—so long as students know how to listen properly, which involves not frenetically taking notes, but listening hard and mentally arguing with the professor as she speaks. Worthen calls this “an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of nonstop social media.” Worthen considers the art of note-taking especially important, for if you do it right, you learn to distill a complex argument to its bare essentials. Such a skill, she says, imparts the lesson that “listening is not the same thing as thinking about what you plan to say next — and that critical thinking depends on mastery of facts, not knee-jerk opinions.”
I have some sympathy for Worthen, for that is exactly how I trained myself to learn as an undergraduate. I limited myself to a half-page of lecture notes per session (except for complicated science courses), and would go over those notes each evening for several hours, trying to reconstruct the lecture from which they came. And I found that technique both fulfilling and instructive—and I did okay in college. Now that I’m on the other side of the lectern, I also follow Worthen’s methods, which she describes as follows:
Holding their attention is not easy. I lecture from detailed notes, which I rehearse before each class until I know the script well enough to riff when inspiration strikes. I pace around, wave my arms, and call out questions to which I expect an answer. When the hour is done, I’m hot and sweaty. A good lecturer is “someone who conveys that there’s something at stake in what you’re talking about,” Dr. Delbanco said. Or as Ms. Severson told me, “I’m a pretty shy person, but when I lecture, there’s a certain charisma. This stuff matters to me — it saved my life.”
This is precisely what I do, and when I lecture I’m pretty much exhausted for the next few hours, covered with sweat and chalk dust and requiring caffeine (I rarely show Powerpoints in science class). But if the lecture went well, I feel great.
But that is a bit self-indulgent. In the end, what really matters is this: which method of instruction is the best way to impart both the knowledge and the learning and thinking skills we want students to acquire? To answer that question, of course, requires data, which in turn requires us to find ways to measure the intangible results we’re hired to promote. Worthen gives no such data, but merely an assertion that the traditional lecture is the best way to teach humanities students how to dissect arguments and think for themselves.
That may well be, but an assertion is just that—an unsupported claim. There may be data backing Worthen’s argument, but I suspect not, or she would have adduced them. From a more self-aggrandizing viewpoint, it might feel a bit dispiriting to be removed from the role of authority figure and entertainer that constitutes the lecturing professor. After all, there are few things as gratifying in academia as having given a good lecture that excites the students and prompts a lot of questions.
Because I was brought up on traditional lectures, from both sides of the podium, I sympathize with Worthen’s views. And she may be right. I’d just like to see the data.
As always, readers are invited to weigh in on this argument.
