Dissecting One (Extremely Boring) College Lecture

This is the fifth episode of our new podcast series on the future of higher education. You can subscribe in iTunes to get prior and future episodes.

This week we’re going back to school.

Well, kind of. We’re focusing on teaching. Specifically the most enduring format for college teaching: the lecture.

It seems the majority of college courses around the country are still taught in the lecture model, but should they be?

Audio Series

Listen to more episodes:

• Why This MIT Dean Is Leaving Her Job to Start a New Kind of University
• Tyler Cowen Says Online Professors Should Think Like Bloggers
• Google’s ‘Education Evangelist': Students Are Changing Faster Than Colleges

This week we’re going to dissect a particular moment of teaching and get a panel of experts to critique it. Think of it like that DVD commentary track, where the experts chime underneath the movie that you’re watching. Or a little bit like that Mystery Science Theater 3000 show from several years ago.

The idea is not to trash these specific instructors, but to examine an approach to teaching up close.

Listen to the full audio. Below is an edited transcript of the podcast.

Goldie Blumenstyk: We actually taped this live at the South by Southwest EDU Conference. At the event we played a video clip of a specific class lecture, but since this is audio we’ll start here by describing it. I think you’ll get the idea.

Jeff Young: The setting is a pretty typical classroom, but one of those computer classrooms. About a dozen students are sitting at desktop computers arranged in rows while the professor stands at the front of the room. There’s a projector, PowerPoint slides on the screen. Here’s how it starts.

Professor’s voice from video: Today I’m going to share with you the most important, most significant, most profound lecture and the reasons that we do what we do — the importance of formatting and documenting your work in the Modern Language style. That this is the seventh edition. I will not accept anything less than the seventh edition, which is the most current, up-to-date, most accurate information available from the Modern Language Association.

We are using what edition? And what edition will we be using class? Class? It is right here on the board for you. Class?

Goldie Blumenstyk: No surprise. Some of the students are using their computers, but they’re not doing anything that’s related to the class. One student is playing solitaire. Another one is chatting away on Facebook. Another is shopping on Amazon, and yet there’s one kid in the back, simply asleep.

Jeff Young: It’s kind of everything that could go wrong is going wrong in this clip, but it’s not footage of a real class in this case. It was staged. Kind of as a parody. It’s an exaggeration of what not to do in a lecture.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Right. Actually this was created some folks at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana as part of their own marketing campaign. I guess their message was, “If you come to our school, this is not the kind of class you’re going to end up with.”

Jeff Young: During the panel, we showed this clip to our three experts on teaching. We actually didn’t even tell them that this was satire. The three teaching experts were Arthur Levine, who’s president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which is starting an ed school with MIT. Phillip Long, who’s at UT-Austin as associate vice provost for learning sciences, and Dawn Zimmaro, at Stanford, as the director of learning design and assessment.

Jeff Young, from conference session: Anybody have any comments out there about this clip of a lecture we watched?

Arthur Levine: I thought he was terrific. Is that a real lecture or is this guy an actor?

Jeff Young: It’s an actor.

Arthur Levine: Yeah. Bueller, Bueller.

Jeff Young: Phil, did you have something you were dying to say?

Phillip Long: Only that it is a little bit too common.

Jeff Young: Dawn, do you have any comments on the lecture we watched?

Dawn Zimmaro: I was impressed by the student playing solitaire. That they actually weren’t sleeping. They were engaged in at least something that was working their mind.

Jeff Young: How often do you guys think this still is at colleges in some form? Maybe not this extreme or maybe this extreme, I don’t know.

Arthur Levine: When we prepare professors, what we really do is prepare them to teach. We prepare them in a subject matter, so they’re experts in content. Then we put them into a classroom. We think if you love the content, you’ve got to be able to teach it. That’s not always wholly true. We’ve made an interesting sort of shift back and forth, which is, in schools we prepare teachers in pedagogy. In colleges we prepare them in content. Each one’s missing what the other one has.

Dawn Zimmaro: In this example we’ve got the professor in a computer classroom. And in addition to the pedagogy and the content knowledge, the technology use and just saying we’re going to put you in a technology enabled classroom — if our instructors really don’t know how to take full advantage of that, something like this is a worst-case scenario. But we’ve seen samples of faculty members, at community colleges and four-year institutions, who don’t know what to do with the technology so they resort to what they know, which is lecture.

Phillip Long: A part of the issue here is that the instructor really doesn’t know where they stand, and I mean that physically as well as metaphorically. Because a lot of what’s going on there could be gently managed by simply moving around the room and looking over the shoulders of people who are doing the solitaire or their Facebook page and making a comment here and there.

They’re not really paying attention to the opportunity that their presence has. In some sense that’s why it’s kind of the dystopian worst example, because it’s a lecture on a flat-floor classroom space with technology-enriched opportunity and they’re not taking advantage of any of the three of them.

Jeff Young (in narration): I know it’s kind of becoming popular to beat up on the lecture format. I didn’t want to only do that, so we asked whether any of our panelists wanted to defend it as, at least when professors are doing lecture correctly, can it be effective?

Phillip Long: I think that there’s a place for lecture. I wouldn’t characterize that place as the appropriate place for effective content and learning acquisition. I would characterize lecture as performance and as community building and as sharing in a discipline with the audience in a way that brings them to it. I wouldn’t expect necessarily it to be the most appropriate way for acquisition.

Arthur Levine: There are some amazing lecturers. Abelard was said in the Middle Ages to have tens of thousands of students attending his lectures. They didn’t even have microphones then. I don’t know how they did that, but he was amazing. We’ve had some other amazing people. Jacques Barzun was supposed to be terrific at teaching Western Civilization. Carl Sagan had a reputation as a terrific teacher. Feynman has that kind of reputation.

The one nice thing now is we can keep the pedagogy and we can make sure that when we use it, every kid has access to the best lecturers in the world.

Dawn Zimmaro: I would just add to that, lecture has historically been about information dissemination. What we really want to work with our faculty members — and some of the best lecturers that I’ve seen are about explanation and conveying to the student how an expert in the field actually thinks, and so we can set up students with the proper prior knowledge so when they come to class and we give a lecture, or we have an instructor give a lecture, and talk about how they think about and reason. I think that actually has an appropriate place versus information dissemination, where students are passive recipients and the entire goal of the lecture is just to record information that the instructor is telling me. That is the model I think that has been breaking down, but as Arthur and Phil are saying, I think we all agree that there is an appropriate place for lecture, context in sort of what the students are bringing to the class.

Phillip Long: Just a quick note. John Seely Brown once was telling me that he was a math major at University of Michigan. For three years he sat in lecture classes and watched the back of his professors as they would do derivations and various things on the board. Except one class where the instructor was doing the same thing and then realized he had made a mistake. All of the sudden he sort of went back to the board and wiped it off and then started thinking aloud as he was figuring out what his mistake was.

He said it was the first time in three years that he actually saw how a math professor thought. It actually was the thing that cemented him to stay in the major and go on from there. Because he was fascinated by the thinking that he saw, it was all prepared before, the person just went through and laid everything out but never actually provided the context or the alternatives or why this particular decision was better than a different one. That particular example stuck with him in a way that changed his career.

Goldie Blumenstyk (in narration): So there is a role for the lecture.

Jeff Young: Yeah. It’s certainly not to say that all are bad, and I think this experience was really fun and it was actually kind of instructive in thinking about, well, colleges, do they do this very much? Is there much attention given to this kind of dissection of teaching and trying to make it better?

Goldie Blumenstyk: You know my sense is for a long time there hasn’t really been.

Jeff Young: Yeah, and as Arthur Levine said during the session, at the K-12 level there is more of a culture of having people stand in the back of the room and give kind of, “Oh you didn’t do this quite as well, you could do this better,” but not in higher ed.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Right, it’s not really how professors are trained when they’re getting their Ph.D.s and preparing to go into the classroom, but I do think as online education and even technology enters the classroom a little bit more they’re going to have to do a little bit more of this. You can’t just be a Lone Ranger professor anymore. You have to do a little extra preparation and think about what you’re going to be presenting because you have to tie it in with all these other partners who are helping you develop your classes.

Jeff Young: I mean, maybe the takeaway is that campuses should start doing this kind of thing, if not a public event, to critique teaching.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Yeah, maybe not bringing in outside strangers to just tell you how you’re doing your class.

Jeff Young: Yeah, but to maybe observe and kind of look at this. At the very least, I think, maybe we’ll come back and do this as an occasional segment on the podcast and do different clips.

Goldie Blumenstyk: Right, if they don’t do it, we will.

Jeff Young: Until next time. Stay tuned.

This has been the Re:Learning Podcast. It’s part of The Chronicle’s coverage on innovation at colleges, and you can read all the articles at Chronicle.com/ReLearning. You can share your own thoughts of course about the role of the lecture, and you can do that on our Facebook page, or give us a shout on Twitter @relearningedu.

Today’s show was produced by me, Jeff Young, our theme music was by Jason Caddell. We’ll be back next week with more stories and analysis about the new learning landscape.

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