Tools of the Trade: Active Learning and Lecturing

A common thread I’ve seen in articles about higher education focuses on the classic lecture. Some authors have taken the position that the lecture is next to useless and should be ditched completely, some defend it as a time-honored and effective teaching technique, and others fall somewhere in between.

A recent article has spurred me to consider where I stand in regards to the college lecture and teacher training. It’s a conversation with Nobel laureate Carl Wieman where he explains that lectures are rather ineffective teaching methods. He likens them to the ancient medical practice of bloodletting, drawing upon the idea that the fact that the patient got better afterwards was purely correlative.

From NPR’s chat with Carl Wieman:

“It’s a very good analogy,” the Stanford professor says. “You let some blood out and go away and they get well. Was it bloodletting that did it, or something else?”

The large college lecture — the cornerstone of undergraduate education in America and much of the world today — is similar, Wieman argues. “You give people lectures, and [some students] go away and learn the stuff. But it wasn’t that they learned it from lecture — they learned it from homework, from assignments. When we measure how little people learn from an actual lecture, it’s just really small.”

I agree with Wieman that the traditional lecture is often not the most effective for student learning. However, there are some important points that aren’t frequently acknowledged in these articles denouncing the lecture and calling for the adoption of active learning techniques.

Lecturing is a tool.

Like any tool, it can be used very well or very poorly. Take several people and put a brush in their hands. Give them paint. If you ask them to create a picture of a house, you’ll likely get very different products in terms of both quality and interpretation from each person.

In much the same way, ask different professors to teach about a given topic using the lecture method and you’ll get a similar variety of “products”. The outcome will depend on the person’s creativity and skill with the tool.

In fact, there have been lectures that I’ve learned quite a deal from. An example from recent memory is a series of biology lectures given by Eric Lander at MIT. I attended them through digital space, watching his chalk talk from the seat in front of my computer.

For me, what is it about Lander’s lecture method that I think is so effective?

It’s not just a pile of facts that he’s disseminating — he’s telling stories. The stories are about the people and the struggles they went through to generate the knowledge that he’s sharing with us. The stories inherently involve the problems and the process that went into figuring out how to solve them. They are stories that give us a way to connect the information to something we can relate to on a personal level — conflict and growth.

We learn from stories. We’re attuned to them. Using the lecture as a means to tell a good story, in my opinion, is a masterful way to use the tool.

And, according to NPR, Wieman hasn’t abandoned the lecture. It seems he has simply tweaked how he uses it:

“We’ve talked about how to get even one wave packet like that if we just have a single value momentum,” Wieman says, offering up a kind of mini-lecture.

But Wieman quickly switches to giving these undergraduate physics majors a problem to discuss and think about in small groups of four or five.

He breaks the lecture up into smaller chunks. Then he uses a different tool. The “brush” this time? Practice problems.

Discipline matters.

The content should be considered when choosing the approach to teach it.

Trying to get students to learn writing or math with a purely lecture-based approach probably isn’t going to go over well.

To get better results, you’d likely want to incorporate different tools. Tools like homework and assignments — the things that Wieman says students actually learn from.

So, for Wieman’s class, he gives the students problems to work on during class. And, presumably these are the style of problems/questions that show up on the exams.

Is it such a surprise then that test scores improve?

If you dedicate in-class time to give students the opportunity to practice solving problems relevant to your course objectives, I would fully expect them to do better on assessments.

If this kind of strategy sounds familiar, it’s because you likely remember it from K-12 education. The idea itself isn’t revolutionary. Its use in “higher” education is sadly considered revolutionary.

Why, then, is a more “active” approach to teaching not being widely used in higher ed? Really digging into the various possible reasons would fill a tome, but I think some of the issues relate to time, expectation, and training.

It costs time to implement these activities in a class.

One aspect of this time cost is actually coming up with good problems or activities for students to work on. This is a creatively demanding task that varies from topic to topic, discipline to discipline. Fine tuning the activities that you come up with is also an iterative effort that requires “field testing” in the classroom.

Also, because it’s difficult to create good questions, it’s tempting to save those questions for an exam — not give them out to students ahead of time. If the goal is to foster understanding, you don’t want students to just memorize a particular answer. In mathematics, however, the field tends to lend itself to a seemingly infinite fountain from which to draw problems. This isn’t necessarily the case for all disciplines.

These activities also cost in-class time. For some instructors, they see this as limiting the amount of material that they can cover in a particular class. Every minute is precious if you want to maximize the number of facts that you can disseminate.

Though, if a majority of those facts are summarily forgotten, what’s the point? Hope students retain some small percentage of them years down the line? And, if many of those facts are now easily accessed through a medium like the internet, shouldn’t the focus of education be on how to sift through those facts to be able to solve new problems?

“Mature” learners

I think there are multiple dubious assumptions, or expectations, regarding undergraduates. Some assume that:

They’ve graduated to a new intellectual level and are mature enough for the classic lecture.

They are disciplined enough to sit through and pay attention to an hour-long verbal delivery while being minimally distracted.

They’re now fully capable at this stage of extracting nuance and meaning from purely lecture-style lessons.

Another issue related to student “maturity” is the idea that activities such as the ones seen in K-12 are for “less advanced” students. That somehow, these activities are unsuitable for adult learners, and it would be insulting to use them. This idea feeds into a perception among some teachers at the college level that students won’t “buy” into a teaching technique different from the lecture.

In my experience, though, this simply isn’t true.

What students “buy” into is your passion for teaching. That passion serves as the marketing for learning. Harness that and you’ll be able to get students on board to try most any “active” learning exercise you want.

An academic paradox

While requirements differ depending on the state, consider what it takes before a person can be hired as a teacher at the K-12 level. Generally, K-12 teachers have formal training in education (through college courses or teaching prep programs). Student teaching internships are typically pursed. Then, training culminates in passing exams for teaching certificates and licenses (commonly required for teaching in public schools).

What do you need at the college level?

No formal education training, certification, or licensing. Usually, an advanced degree in the field you’re going to teach is the minimum.

It’s assumed that through your advanced studies you gain sufficient teaching experience or education training.

This frequently isn’t true.

The amount of teaching a grad student does is dependent on their own inclination towards teaching and how tolerant their thesis adviser is of it. After all, time spent teaching is time away from the lab doing research. And, classes in education are often not required for the degree program. If you’re lucky, the department might have some sort of workshop to help graduate students develop teaching skills.

Then, for many PhD students, the bulk of their “teaching” practice comes in the form of giving research presentations. Talks where they stand at a podium delivering information. Sometimes for 45–60 minutes straight.

Is it surprising, then, the prevalence of the classic lecture as the foremost teaching tool in higher ed?

There’s a large discrepancy in education training between K-12 and higher-ed teachers. It definitely shows based on one of the comments (by kbpole) from the NPR article we started with:

He’s revolutionized education with active learning? K-12 could learn from his model? Are you serious, NPR? Any respectable K-12 teacher practices “active learning” every single day — small groups, large groups, jigsaw activities, fishbowl discussions, silent discussions, Socratic discussions, Socratic seminars, document analyses, project-based learning, lit circles, independent reading and research projects, hands-on labs, field trips, interdisciplinary team teaching, and the list goes on. I have the utmost respect for the academic achievements of university faculty, but it’s time for university faculty (and NPR staff, evidently) to recognize K-12 teachers as professionals. If colleges and universities want to learn how to teach, take a look out the window of that ivory tower.

The tools of the teaching trade are many — lecturing being the most frequently used in higher ed. This is because it’s the tool that gets practiced the most in graduate student training and professional settings (seminars and conferences). Despite its widespread use, though, the skillful use of the lecture is relatively rare — in either research or teaching.

However, the tools that we use should fit the educational tasks at hand. But, if all we know how to use is a hammer (lecture), then every class is going to look like a nail.

To revolutionize higher education, we’ll need to become masters of the tools we already know as well as expand our proficiency with many others.