My course evaluations are in. They are mostly encouraging — except for the ones that say I should lecture more.
“Lessen the amount of reading per week and just lecture more,” reads one comment. Another student laments that there isn’t enough note-taking in class. Still other students want more “key terms” and “slides.” And another reports that, while they learned a great deal in my course, they wish there had been “less discussion and more instruction.”
The traditional lecture endures as the default instructional mode of many postsecondary classrooms. That remains the case despite evidence that exhaustive exposition from instructors tends only to benefit a particular type of student. It’s true despite an ever-growing research base that showcases the payoff of active learning. That term refers to ambitious instructional practices that prioritize collaboration, discussion, and problem-solving in college teaching. By authentically applying what they have learned, students in an active-learning classroom are not mere recipients of knowledge but engaged participants.
Why does the traditional lecture persist? For one thing, faculty members seldom enter the college classroom having had serious instructional training. Many of us have had few sustained opportunities to broaden our instructional designs. In the absence of such training, we rely on memories of our own past instructors. We teach as we were taught, goes the adage. If lectures dominated our classroom experiences as students — and chances are, they did — we, too, may retreat to our lecterns and hold forth.
But that is only half the story. The course evaluations I highlighted above add a plot twist: Plenty of students are Team Lecture. And such students help reinforce the idea that the traditional lecture should reign supreme in the college classroom.
A case in point is a 2019 study led by Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning in arts and sciences at Harvard University. Researchers randomly assigned college students in a physics course to either an active-learning classroom or a passive-learning one relying on lectures. Instructors in both taught the same material. The study found that students in the lecture classroom believed that they had learned more than those in the active one, but the active-learning students actually demonstrated higher mastery on an assessment given to both groups.
Those astonishing findings highlight how deeply ingrained undergraduate perceptions about college learning can be — and how difficult the resistance from students can be for a faculty member who wants to lecture less and use active learning more in the classroom.
Other research adds to this picture. A 2011 study of community-college students, for example, found that they widely “interpreted the absence of a lecture as the absence of instruction.” Other studies provide further evidence of student resistance to active-learning pedagogies — and evidence that pushback from undergraduates can prompt instructors to abandon such practices altogether. Maybe the puzzling appraisals I received on my course evaluations are not so puzzling after all.
What can we do? Here are five considerations I’ll be following this coming fall in response to that nagging “less discussion, more instruction” evaluation.
Lecture … sparingly. This column shouldn’t be read as a call to throw out the lecture altogether. Lectures have value. Lectures can efficiently convey a set of ideas to students. Lectures allow us to model curiosity, showcase our original work, or grab students’ interest through a clear and captivating narrative.
But classrooms are especially unique because they are, by nature, crowded places. They are a wonderful jumble of personalities, lived experiences, and different forms of expertise. By valuing monologue over dialogue, continuous lecturing fails to capitalize on this core aspect of classroom life.
Moreover, it overlooks the fact that students are constantly processing, and they can make better use of lecture material when given focused opportunities to apply it. By lecturing sparingly, you can hold on to the benefits of traditional lectures, satisfy some learners’ preference for exposition from an instructor, and, at the same time, make room for active learning.
Routinely ask how the course is going. Keep a pulse on how students are experiencing active-learning practices as they unfold in real time. By establishing a feedback loop, you can collect evidence regularly, spot patterns, and weigh their answers in your planning. Hearing students out over the course of a semester offers you an evolving read of whether particular activities or teaching strategies are effective (or not). Immediate feedback allows you to respond to concerns and confusions before it’s too late.
To be sure, students may be less apt to offer candid feedback during the semester (when they’re worried about their grades) than after a course has formally concluded. But the stronger and more frequent your feedback loop, the more willing students may be to tell you how they really feel, and the better able you’ll be to explain why you’re taking this approach and bring students on board with it, or adjust if you hear that it’s just not working.
Be transparent. Faculty members sometimes operate in an aura of mystique. We have the knowledge; students don’t. We impart that knowledge in a particular way, and we think our methods require no introduction. But if students do not understand how a particular learning design helps them arrive at a particular outcome, they tend to be less invested in a course.
Why not pull back the curtain and make your pedagogical choices known? Take a few minutes to share directly with students the research that has influenced your teaching practices. Explain your thought processes for specific activities or assignments.
In my own teaching, I engage students in a variety of discussion configurations that I leverage to reach specific objectives. Had I been more transparent about my approach last spring, at least some of my students might have better understood its purpose and value. They might have also seen how class discussion is, in fact, an evidence-based form of instruction.
Manage student anxieties. Active learning flattens the teacher-student hierarchy that is characteristic of so many college classrooms. The resulting environment affords students more power and ownership over their learning, but that newfound control can be anxiety-inducing. A student-centered classroom may ultimately offer more educational benefits than a teacher-centered one; nevertheless, students may prefer the latter precisely because it poses fewer risks and demands less of them.
If you position students at the center of your course design — with activities that require their active participation, not just listening and note-taking — then you must be willing to manage their anxieties on this front. By that I mean:
- Meet with students one on one to discuss their concerns and guide them in understanding how to participate.
- Scaffold assignments. Start small and, over the semester, progressively build toward more demanding learning experiences.
- For activities that emphasize group work, consider having students convene with the same sets of peers for extended periods, so they get comfortable working together through challenging tasks.
- On a larger scale, take steps to foster a classroom environment in which students feel safe going out on a limb and know you will support them when they do.
Unlearn. By the time students enter college they have spent thousands of hours in classrooms. Some of those hours may have prepared them well for ambitious learning designs, but decades of research in K-12 settings has also demonstrated that the road to active learning has been a rocky one. Too often, the most familiar classroom is one with desks in rows and eyes on the teacher. Many students come to us having mastered that arrangement.
You may have to help your students unlearn some of the schooling practices into which they have been long socialized. They may have to unlearn that the instructor is an all-knowing authority, that a peer is no authority at all, that feeling uncomfortable or frustrated means they aren’t learning.
Recall the physics experiment that I described earlier. Compared with students in the lecture classroom, students in the active-learning one believed they had learned less. The assessment, however, told a different story. Deslauriers and his colleagues hypothesized that students felt that way because they struggled more in the active-learning classroom: “The cognitive effort involved in this type of instruction may make students frustrated and painfully aware of their lack of understanding, in contrast with fluent lectures that may serve to confirm students’ inaccurately inflated perceptions of their own abilities.”
To help students unlearn, foster candid dialogues in class. Ask them to think critically about their past learning experiences and uncover where their expectations — about college learning, in particular — come from. Try to incorporate focused reflections and metacognitive exercises into your lessons or after specific activities.
Shifting your classroom away from a lecture-heavy style is a process. It may introduce growing pains for instructors and students. But by taking purposeful steps like these, we can better acclimatize students to active learning and wean them off lectures.
