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EFFECTIVE LECTURES
Effective lecturers combine the talents of scholar, writer, producer, comedian, showman, and teacher in ways that contribute to student learning.
—W. J. McKeachie
Lecturing is probably the oldest and still most commonly used teaching method in the American college classrooms. It is recognized for the following strengths:
- Lectures can communicate the intrinsic interest of the subject matter. The speaker can convey personal enthusiasm in a way that no book or other media can. Enthusiasm stimulates interest and interested, stimulated people tend to learn more.
- Lectures in university settings can provide students with role models of scholars in action. The professor's way of approaching knowledge can be demonstrated for students to emulate.
- Lectures can convey material otherwise unavailable, including original research or recent developments that have not yet made it to publication.
- Lectures can organize material in a special way. They may be a faster, simpler method of presenting information to an audience with its own special needs. Lectures are particularly useful for students who read poorly or who are unable to organize print material.
- Lectures can convey large amounts of factual material in a limited time frame.
- Lectures can speak to many listeners at the same time.
- Lectures permit maximum teacher control. The instructor chooses what material to cover, whether to answer questions, and other courses of action.
- Lectures present minimum threat to students. They are not required to do anything, which they may prefer.
- Lectures emphasize learning by listening, an advantage for students who learn well this way.
- Lectures offer "face-to face confrontations with other talking, gesturing, thinking, feeling humans (Eble, 1976)."
However, with the increasing availability of information via various media, particularly through the Internet, attending lectures is no longer considered by many students as the main way to obtain new information. Another challenge instructors face today is the diverse learning styles or preferences of today's students. For many of them, passively listening to lectures is not conducive to their learning. Furthermore, researchers and an increasing number of instructors have identified the following weaknesses of traditional didactic lectures:
- Lectures put students in a passive rather than active role.
- Lectures lack feedback to both the instructor and the student about the students' learning. They encourage mainly one-way communication.
- Lectures require effective speaking skills and use of voice. Such skills are not stressed or trained in most graduate programs and are distributed unevenly among college professors.
- Lectures place the burden of organizing and synthesizing content solely on the lecturer.
- Lectures are not well suited to complex, detailed, or abstract material, nor are they well suited to higher levels of learning such as application, analysis, and synthesis.
- Lectures assume that all students are learning at the same pace and at the same level of understanding, which is hardly ever true.
- Lectures tend to be forgotten quickly.
Bonwell (1995) also has the following observations:
- Most people cannot listen effectively to a lecture over a sustained period of time (research shows this attention span to be 15 minutes or less).
- The relative effectiveness of a lecture depends upon the educational level of the audience (those with more education tend to be better listeners).
- The lecture is less effective with those who learn more proficiently in ways other than listening.
- Lectures are less effective than active learning in promoting thinking or changing attitudes.
Given the strengths and weaknesses of lecturing, while planning a course or class period instructors should consider if the lecture approach is the best way to present the content for achieving instructional goals. Lecturing is very appropriate for some goals and very inappropriate for others.
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