We’re back in the season of lecture fetishism. ‘Workshy’ lecturers are being ‘ordered’ back into the classroom to provide ‘proper’ value-for-money education rather than cut-price online stuff, while apparently the university life of a Times‘ columnist’s offspring would be ruined by having too much online learning. What’s striking is how far their conception of what should be restored is the sort of lecture that went out of fashion, at least outside basic introductory courses in the hard sciences, decades ago: to quote the old joke, the lecture as a means of transferring information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notes without passing through the brains of either. And, as I commented last week, some of the defences of the shift to online learning are equally ignorant of what actually happens in lecture rooms these days. It really feels like a debate about the current state of popular music between adherents of 7″ flexidiscs and proponents of cassette singles; not just total indifference to the content (hey, maybe someone should suggest to the Times that it’s easier to promote decolonisation and cultural Marxism in in-person classes where there are no recordings…) but utter ignorance of how technology and techniques have changed, and what the real issues are.
The term ‘lecture’ is obviously part of the problem; in its traditional pairing/contrast with ‘seminar’, it no longer describes a distinctive activity or even a particular approach to teaching and learning, but simply denotes the size of the student group and (often) the nature of the room and the seating arrangements (which do then set certain limits on what can and can’t be done, and affect aspects of the experience). It’s a bit like the old distinction between singles and albums, which persists partly for the benefit of the music industry and journalism and partly because of the continuing influence of old people and their memories; for the young, increasingly they’re just ways of organising ‘tracks’, to be consumed in many different ways. Both lectures and seminars contain a mixture of content, discussion, small-group work, structured activities and debate, Q&A etc., just in different contexts and with a different feel; it’s a bit like putting together playlists for different occasions. (And, yes, I’m old enough that I originally wrote that as ‘mix-tapes’…).
If the ‘lecture’ is defined by anything, it’s passivity: both the traditional idea of what it’s all about, and the dynamics created by the class size and the design of bigger teaching rooms, constantly push the event in the direction of ‘aged authority figure knowledge to you dispense now will’. (And maybe that’s a major part of the fetishisation: it’s not the actual knowledge so much as the dispensing of it that matters, from someone who looks like a proper academic, and live one-off performance is clearly so much more of a worthwhile experience than a recording, at least when the performer is still alive.* The art of the lecture in an age of mechanical reproduction… Of course, this isn’t entirely new; I went to few lectures when I was a student, as simply hearing someone reading out their book didn’t seem very worthwhile – I wanted a live experience that was clearly different from the record, or stuff I hadn’t heard before…).
So… many of us have spent years developing different techniques to combat this tendency towards passivity in big lecture groups – and spent much of the last year developing new ones, as a lot of the old ones simply didn’t work in an online setting. Much of this was hard work, and unsatisfying all round, and I am desperate to get back into a normal classroom as a result – but not completely. Padlet looks like it will have continuing usefulness, offline and on, as an easier way to get discussion groups to report their conclusions rather than having to pick on people. At the moment I’m wondering how to recreate the Teams (or Zoom) Chat function, allowing students to ask questions, comment and talk amongst themselves in parallel to content delivery rather than in separate segments of activity, to emphasise that it is all, all the time, a matter of discussion and debate rather than a mixture of Authoritative Content and Officially Sanctioned Points of Uncertainty.
At the moment it looks as if I just have to run Teams at the same time – which will of course be good for any students who need to self-isolate even while the rest of the class meets in person – whereas what I really want is a chat sidebar to the PowerPoint slides. And what I really want is a holographic me to do the lecturing bits while I monitor the chat, or perhaps a clone – unless I can get an implant to connect the chat to my optic nerve so that it appears projected in front of me, and I can type replies just through eye movements….
The lecture isn’t dead, it’s just gone a bit William Gibson.
*While a recording of a lecturer may seem to students and their opinion columnist parents like a cheap and shoddy substitute, even if it’s actually more expensive to produce, it’s surely only a matter of time before someone starts offering the experience of being lectured by academic superstars who are inconveniently dead. Chicago will soon have an animatronic Leo Strauss, and I believe the Cambridge Classics Faculty is working on a hologram of Keith Hopkins, to restore a vital element of the initiation trials of ancient history graduate students.
Update: with crushing inevitability, Gavin Williamson has been doing the media round this morning, suggesting that universities which don’t return to full in-person teaching shouldn’t charge full fees; he then admits that the government can’t force them to, but in any case the point is not to make reforms but to direct any possible anger towards convenient targets that aren’t the government. As Andrew McRae (@McRaeAndrew) commented:
More entertainingly, Angela Murphy (@angelamurphy) passed on a link to evidence that zombie lecturers already exist, just not celebrity ones: Link.
Sphinx 
That sort of ‘out of fashion’ lecture remains the key tool in a lot of professional training, eg. law, where it is not all that effective for precisely the reason you mention. The institutions (which call themselves universities) which offer this sort of training lay it on thick too – and this may be a factor in people’s minds.
Interesting – my knowledge of how e.g. law is taught today is basically zero. I was always struck – back when I had a faculty teaching role in my previous institution – that subjects where I would have assumed a traditional content-driven approach would be prevalent, such as Medicine and Veterinary Medicine, seemed to be as cutting-edge as anyone in focus on e-learning, development of active reflection and practical activities etc.
Yes, legal training for e.g. law conversion courses is lecture-heavy. That’s interesting re medicine. My sense at uni was that e.g. engineers spent a lot of time in lectures. That may not be right, or right anymore…
Regular reader, anonymised for reasons that will become apparent, writes:
Career-limiting confession: I lecture. I’m talking at the beginning of the 50 minutes and I’m talking at the end. I mean, I get into it, I move around the place, I use music and video and stuff – Mr Powerpoint Slide Reader I am definitely not. But “a mixture of content, discussion, small-group work, structured activities and debate, Q&A etc.”? Yikes. Come to my lectures and what you get is a lecture – we don’t break off for small-group work any more than TED Talks do. (Braces self for incoming links to wildly successful TED Talks with breaks for small-group work.)
I hang on to something my PGCert tutor said, that the one thing A Lecture does that more interactive forms don’t is model thinking. We’re always asking students to put together extended and coherent arguments and to say what they actually think – which is quite a demanding combination when you look at it – and the lecture shows them what that actually looks like to do. I do that right enough. But the other stuff? I’ve tried, goodness knows – but what do you actually do when you ask people to talk to their neighbour and half the room stays in friendship groups of 3 or 4 and the other half refuses to move – or when you give them an open prompt and get absolutely nothing back – or give them a structured prompt and get absolutely nothing back…? Even getting questions or comments is like pulling teeth – it seems as if either they think they’ve got it (and don’t want to say anything in case it’s too obvious) or they’re baffled (and don’t want to look stupid). Perhaps my trouble is that I hate those moments of silence more than anything – I feel exposed and, frankly, despised* – so what I do is Not Do That Next Week, and by about week 6 I’ve tried everything once and it’s a relief to get back to me doing the talking.
Anyway, that’s enough Fesshole-ing. You’re clearly way ahead of me on this one – and asking how you do it would be like asking me how I take notes on books or something. Still… how do you do it? Is it just a matter of really wanting to? (I may be at a disadvantage there – all I want to do is learn stuff and talk about what I’ve learned. But we can do seminars another time.)
*Bullied kids should perhaps not consider education as a career
I didn’t mean to lecture-shame anybody! But thank you for this thought-provoking confession. I think my response would start with *why* I do it, which is a combination of the fact that ai found most lectures utterly tedious when I was a student, especially introductory survey lectures, and so have been reacting against that ever since, and of my conviction that studying history is all about interpretation and debate, and so every aspect of teaching should be about trying to develop those skills and that attitude. I do absolutely see what you mean about ‘modelling’ argument, and that is one of the things I aim to do – but my worry is that if I just try to do that in a straightforward manner, too many students will simply copy down what I say rather than make the effort to grasp *why* I’m saying it. Yes, what we ask them to do is big and demanding, so what I try to do in my classes is break that down into different components and activities, and then try to show how they fit back together.
*How* do I do it? I keep trying new things, because most students are reluctant to say anything, and some groups are worse than others (my feeling is that there’s a dynamic that can be swayed one way or the other, but if they get into the habit of passivity then it’s very difficult indeed to break it), so you have to explore as many possibilities as possible until they respond to something and then start getting more comfortable with such engagement. There are some definite no’s – anything that looks like a closed question where there’s a single correct answer – but otherwise just a repertoire of things. Recently – particularly as a lot of my Exeter classes are two hours, and so absolutely cannot just be me talking at them – I’ve been exploring the use of games and other activities, because they are then not focusing on the possibility of having to say something at some point, but just on the activity, and then they are more likely to have things to say. I totally agree about the horrors of silence – but so do they; their aim is to get you to crack and start talking again, after which they know they won’t have to talk in future, but if you can hold your nerve then sooner or later one of them will crack instead…
But of course this is the UK system, where I have some leeway to impose things on the students without worrying about retaliation in evaluations or class enrolments; this may be much tougher in other countries.
I’m in the UK and worry a great deal about retaliation in evaluations – anything below a 4/5 average and you have to Account for Yourself – *and* class enrolments, or at least class disengagement. (Do your students just come back week after week, even if you’ve confused or bored them? Why?)
I feel the need to unburden myself again. Stand back.
Both as a student and as an early-career lecturer (in a different institution) I was used to old-style lectures and discussion-based seminars – where you’d assign reading, get the students to take you through the key points and then talk about whatever else came up. For several years now I’ve been teaching students who don’t read before lectures or seminars, in a setting where a “seminar” is basically a classroom teaching session, generally following directly after the lecture. What with that and the standing injunction to break up lectures as much as possible, designing and implementing structured learning packages is a huge part of my job. And I still don’t feel I can do it – although part of it may be that I don’t want to: I really liked the “discussion-based seminar with reading beforehand” system & felt I worked well within it. This system just feels like school – and I hated school.
This sounds…not ideal. To explain my position slightly more clearly: much of the time, I’m teaching modules that are mandatory for at least one degree programme, so a fair number of students *have* to take them (and they have to run); the lectures are supposed to be developing skills as well as slivering content, so students not attending because I wasn’t lecturing them enough wouldn’t get any sympathy. And of course I’m expected not to just lecture at them for two hours, and would get marked down heavily in peer review if I did, so again complaints that I keep forcing them to talk wouldn’t get anywhere. The fact that I’m senior doesn’t hurt, both that I don’t have to worry about building a promotion case on the basis of student evaluations, and maybe that they’re more prepared to accept my instructions. Finally, I don’t *think* I confuse or bore too many of them too much – especially as I no longer teach a course focused on theory and methodology (there was always at least one student every year who absolutely loathed that…).
I really can’t see the point of a seminar that is just another teaching session, no; is that really the idea, or is it just what they’ve become? Students not doing the reading is a perennial problem. How much of a problem depends on what the aim is: if doing the reading is a good itself then you have to change the structure of incentives to get more of them to do it (most obviously, I think, through assessment design – students are thoroughly rational in prioritising things that are clearly related to short-term success, so you need to design tasks that also promote longer-term development), whereas if the reading is basically just a means of trying to promote discussion by giving everyone the same starting point, then there are other ways of promoting discussion.
I am now of course intrigued to know which institution you’re at – but since this is such a small world, that would probably be tantamount to identifying yourself…
I’m not a classicist, so that’s less of a worry. (Why am I on this blog? Latin A Level, Greek tragedy at university – and it’s interesting to read someone reflecting on academic life.)
As for where I am, let’s just say it’s a post-92. When I took the job (after years of being insecure and/or underpaid at a RG institution) a friend who’d come from a post-92 gave me two pieces of advice: “don’t get dragged down” and “write your way out”. (When The Job did finally come up – what I’d been doing at the old place, only permanent – I didn’t even get an interview. Apparently I should also have been grant-incoming my way out.)
Anyway, seminars coming straight after lectures – or at least that being students’ strong preference – and involving no specific preparation are well-established features of our curriculum. The idea is to get the students talking – get them Working With The Ideas and Making Them Their Own – but in the absence of reading to discuss, that basically necessitates setting them an exercise to do in groups (and then another exercise for when they finish the first one in half the time you’d planned – see also “the power of common sense”). Whole-class discussions aren’t really practical – not least because seminar group size has crept up over the years, from 16 (and that was a bigger group than I’d ever had to handle before) to 30 or even 40 (at which point room size becomes a hard limit, at least if everyone turns up). It’s all a lot more like being a schoolteacher than I’d like.
Ah, I thought your earlier reference to Antigone was a clue as to your current activities…
This continues to be very interesting. If seminars after lectures is the student preference, what’s the rationale, given that it was persuasive enough to get the Powers That Be to go along with it? (I can imagine cynical answers, e.g. getting several classes out of the way at once and so keeping more of the rest of the week free, but that’s a terrible argument from a teaching and learning perspective…)
Just remembered I left your last comment unanswered. Yes, “getting several classes out of the way at once and so keeping more of the rest of the week free” is precisely the rationale, or at least one of them – the days when you could reject a request to transfer seminar groups “to fit in with work” are long gone. A couple of years ago (i.e. before All This) I specifically requested seminar sessions on a different day from the lecture, and got a lot of funny looks – they aren’t going to like that… (Which, indeed, they didn’t.)
That said, some academics seem to like getting it all over with as well; years ago we used to operate more of a split between lectures and seminars, and I remember a colleague saying she wished she could run a single two-hour session instead. But why you wouldn’t want students to have a chance to let the lecture sink in – and maybe even do some reading – before you get them talking, I really don’t know.
There are other ways of promoting discussion, but a well-written paper is such a good one! (Modelling, again – students don’t necessarily realise that it’s possible to (e.g.) advance several different arguments without immediately committing to any one of them.)
Assessment design is, increasingly, the nub of it, in that it’s basically impossible to get students to do anything outside of contact hours unless they’re going to get a mark for it. I try to get them to do stuff they’re genuinely interested in (which is Rogers again), essentially getting them to want to work harder than they would have done otherwise – but tying that in to weekly seminars is another matter.
When I did my PG teaching qualification, I encountered the ideas of Carl Rogers, and tried to put them into action in one seminar group. Personally I found it congenial, as it involved opening up the discussion without assigning reading. Basically, anything anyone says which is vaguely on-topic – anything anyone wants to do with the time, as long as it’s vaguely on-topic – is OK; the group manages its own learning. The result was a lively, engaged, high-achieving group of 12-15 students, with a core of 5-6 who attended every week for the whole year… in a cohort of 50+. Success or failure? Admittedly, in previous years I’d had similar cohorts with even fewer attending all year, so it was an improvement on that at least – but the thought that there’s an approach that I believe in, and enjoy doing, and that it works as advertised but only for a quarter of the students I’m supposed to be teaching is even more depressing than just thinking I “can’t do it”. (It could work for a lot more than a quarter of them, I’m sure of it – but to find out they’d have to keep coming back, and I’ve got no way of making them do that.)
Turnout’s not nearly as variable as that for lectures, thankfully. (Rogers is no help there, though, as a Rogerian system wouldn’t have regular lectures at all.)
So structured learning activities it is, I guess. Games sound ideal [googles “games”…] – or any activity where students can focus on the activity itself and not be second-guessing the kind of thing they think I think they ought to be saying at the end of it. That, or spotting the dilemma I’ve posed and fixing it with the power of common sense (“well, Antigone’s doing what she believes in and you’ve got to respect that, but you’ve got to obey the law, haven’t you – I mean, most of the time”). Early-career exposure to Law students – who were happy to take one horn of a dilemma and defend it to the crack of doom – is something else that’s spoilt me for my current employment!
Rogers sounds interesting, but to be honest I’m not surprised at the outcome; I don’t know of any pedagogical method that actually works for everyone, let alone something quite so radical – and it’s always worth keeping in mind that (1) students are, on average, pretty conservative in their expectations of teaching and learning styles (I devote a lot of effort at the beginning of every year to trying to deprogramme new first years from everything they ever learnt at school, more or less, as otherwise they just fall back on familiar practices) and (2) you’re never the only person teaching them, so even if you do radical things they are still being kept in their comfort zone by others, which means that all but the keenest will tend to avoid the unfamiliar unless it’s clearly in their interests to continue to engage.
Tl;dr: a lot of the time, it’s not you, it’s them.