The Case Against Lectures
nautil.us
nautil.us
For example, I was previously a Financial Economics Professor and "flipped" the classroom for my introductory corporate finance class. This means that the students watched prerecorded video lectures at home and then worked out their "homework" in class. So basically, the students had someone (me) to ask questions of when they hit stumbling blocks. Pedagogically, this has shown improvements in learning achievements.
HOWEVER, the problem I ran into is pretty similar to what I have heard from every other faculty member (across disciplines and universities) who has attempted to do this. The problem is that we repeatedly hear from students that "he didn't even teach us anything, he just made us watch videos." This wasn't just one or two students, this was an overwhelming majority. The other problem I ran into was that students thought there was no benefit to coming to class (even when you include attendance as part of their grades). The number of students dropping the course at the last 'W' deadline skyrocketed.
For me, it became a challenge to continue to do it this way, even though I spent 3+ months full time over a summer producing videos of my lectures, and eventually went back to the "chalk and talk". My student opinion polls went back up.
I'm not entirely sure of what the solution to the problem is, but project based learning does greatly enhance learning. That needs to be baked into the institution.
Students can’t fake it in my flipped classroom style. If they come unprepared, and this is obvious when it happens, I don’t help them doing the problem sets in class. I only help the students who are prepared. The lectures they are supposed to watch have been created by me. I create my own content. The slackers die off quickly in my format. This makes for a much better end of semester for me and the remaining students.
There is no cure for apathy. If they don’t want to work they won’t. They’ll blame whatever they can regardless of format.
I do wonder how success is measured in the article. Is it passing rate? That’s easy to increase. Has the material been mastered better in alternative format classes? That should be the real test of success. To date I’ve never encountered an institution that measures success correctly.
The article actually just talks about distribution of teaching modes, but links to an article about positive outcome from active learning that uses passing rate as metric.
I don't know about that. Standardized exams get students to focus on exam prep to the exclusion of all else. Then, when they encounter material outside the scope of the exam, they struggle mightily.
I think we should be teaching broadly applicable problem-solving skills, not highly specific standardized exam material.
Also a test written by a third party could be varied from semester to semester. But almost all students at the level I teach at struggle with encountering a new problem type. I think it would carry more weight if student success in calc 1 were measured by how many who take calc 2 pass and how many can pass a standardized calc 1 exam and other such measures of student knowledge.
edit: ah sorry I see you said the drop out rate itself doesn’t change, fair enough.
That's a little harsh, and also doesn't even acknowledge that the teacher has any responsibility to engage their students and spark their interest in the subject.
Students might not do their homework and engage with the subject for all sorts of reasons apart from apathy. They might have depression, be too stressed out, or have a host of other emotional problems that affect their performance and engagement. They might have taken on too large of a course load, or might not be getting enough sleep because of work they're doing outside of school or be preoccupied in taking care of their family. In some schools, the students' own safety, or that of their family, might be their overwhelming preoccupation.
When I was young, I had a lot of trouble motivating myself in subjects I didn't find interesting, but excelled in those I did. You could call the cause of my performance in the former subjects "apathy", but the teacher also has a role to play here, and need not be just a helpless bystander.
On occasion I was lucky enough to have talented teachers who were able to interest me in subjects that I found completely uninteresting before I took their class. But way too often I had teachers who would read straight out of the textbook during class, who you could tell really did not enjoy teaching, or who just weren't particularly good at it.
In those cases, the students have to rely on whatever interest they have in the subject to keep them going. If they don't have that interest, then they have to find motivation some other way. This can be difficult for kids who are still maturing and finding their way in the world.
My own performance at university improved tremendously when I went back after working for many years, and I was able to harness a tremendous motivation that I just didn't have when I was younger. I was also able to eliminate distractions, focus completely on performing well at school, and over the years had finally learned how to learn (a skill usually not taught at school). As a result I greatly outperformed virtually all the rest of my much younger classmates.
Finding a sense of direction, becoming effectively self-motivating, seeing academic performance as more important than partying or other outside interests, knowing how to learn, understanding how tough it is as an adult in the "real world" and what a difference having skills and knowledge could make, having a genuine interest in the subject matter, valuing knowledge and learning for their own sake, and many other things that could help students perform academically are things that schools could help students with, but unfortunately usually they don't.
It seems to be that the responsibility level depends on the institution. For K-12 teachers, they're definitely responsible for trying to help every student succeed. But in college the students are there voluntarily in order to better educate themselves. The responsibility to succeed lies with them. The teacher's responsibility is to teach the material to the best of the students ability to learn it. That maximizes the value the student gets (and is able to get) for the education they're paying for.
A grey area would be college courses that are required for a degree, but which the student has no interest in. They're being forced to buy a product they don't want, as part of a package that includes the products that they do want. Sometimes they might not understand that the required courses really are necessary to fully understand the rest of the courses, but sometimes it's like cable TV where the under-performers are bundled with the desirable channels to justify higher overall prices.
That might accurately describe the current education system, but we can do better. Viewing the system as merely a marketplace of information for rational consumers is really part of the problem.
That view leads to teachers and schools throwing up their hands and pretending they're helpless when students don't consume the product they're offering. But they're not helpless. There is a lot they can do, and if they don't do it, it's their choice not to.
The students aren't helpless either, but their own attitudes towards learning are shaped by those very institutions which aren't doing as much as they could do to encourage a love of learning, knowing how to learn, or any of the other things mentioned in my original post which could make a great difference in educational outcomes.
The students attitudes towards learning are also shaped by parents who've been through the same often ineffective institutions, and come out with an indifference or even a contempt for learning. The schools and society as a whole could do better. A lot better.
I had much the same experience -- after dropping out twice before going on a 7-year hiatus from higher education, when I went back I had purpose. I was also paying my own way and remaining debt-free, so I had a vested financial stake in getting my money's worth. I got one professor forced into early retirement and another barred from teaching undergraduate courses because of unsatisfactory performance (I never hesitated to remind anyone of WHO was paying WHOM), but student apathy and short-cutting (CHEGG-ing homework) were much larger issues than poor professorship.
"Finding a sense of direction, becoming effectively self-motivating, seeing academic performance as more important than partying or other outside interests, knowing how to learn, understanding how tough it is as an adult in the "real world" and what a difference having skills and knowledge could make, having a genuine interest in the subject matter, valuing knowledge and learning for their own sake, and many other things that could help students perform academically are things that schools could help students with, but unfortunately usually they don't."
Perhaps the idea that students default straight into higher education after completion of secondary education, without first gaining real-world experience and focus, should be reexamined.
I returned to college around age 30 and kept a 4.0 through most of my undergraduate classes. Now, I'm an environmental scientist doing consulting work for other scientists when they can't figure out how to analyze their own data.
I stressed for many years about how far behind I perceived myself to be, but not anymore. I look around and what I see, generally speaking, is a lot of people working in fields they don't enjoy and/or aren't particularly talented in. I may have wasted a lot of time but I enjoy my work, I am good at it, and I am compensated well for my time. I win.Teachers come in a variety of talents and have a variety of teaching styles. One thing that colleges do poorly is align a student's learning style with a teacher's teaching style. Is a teacher supposed to be a great motivator? I don't know. I do know that I'm not particularly good in the inspiration department. I'm enthusiastic. I think I'm good at explaining stuff.
Students might not do their homework and engage with the subject for all sorts of reasons apart from apathy. They might have depression, be too stressed out, or have a host of other emotional problems that affect their performance and engagement. They might have taken on too large of a course load, or might not be getting enough sleep because of work they're doing outside of school or be preoccupied in taking care of their family.
I was attempting to only reference apathetic students. They are a subset of the students who don't do the work required of them. What you write is certainly true; particularly at community colleges. However, as I tell my students, for each person it requires x amount of hours (x varies from person to person) to master the material. If you don't have the time, inclination, ability, or are otherwise incapable of devoting x hours to the learning the subject then you won't learn it. Nothing will change this.
If a student can't devote 5 hours a week to a 5 credit course in homework then they likely won't do well. The reason for their inability is somewhat irrelevant in the sense that one needs to put in the effort. If you can't you won't learn the material. Nothing I do can change this fact.
What I can do is to try to make x as small as possible for each person. I try.
You have to look for the cause of the apathy to have any hope of "curing" it.
Was the apathy caused by depression? Then you have to treat the depression. Was it caused by lack of interest in the subject? Well, then you have to get students interested in the subject, and so on. Usually there are reasons for the poor attitudes some students have towards learning, and helps to understand those reasons before one can be effective at channeling them towards something more positive.
"If a student can't devote 5 hours a week to a 5 credit course in homework then they likely won't do well. The reason for their inability is somewhat irrelevant in the sense that one needs to put in the effort. If you can't you won't learn the material. Nothing I do can change this fact."
You can't change the amount of work required, but you and the school as a whole can influence the student's willingness and ability to put in that amount of work.
"Is a teacher supposed to be a great motivator? I don't know. I do know that I'm not particularly good in the inspiration department."
If you're not, then you're just not going to be as effective as a teacher who is good at inspiring students. Whether or not a teacher is "supposed to" be a great motivator, there's no denying that when the goal is having students learn, and when student apathy is a real problem, having inspiring teachers should be a priority.
With a 100 students each semester I don’t have the time or inclination to find out about their personal struggles. We are here to learn mathematics. If that is not true of a person then they shouldn’t be taking math classes. Such is my general view in the matter. I’m not an extremist and exceptions do apply.
If a student, for whatever reason, can’t devote the required time to a course then they shouldn’t take it. The best teacher in my department, the most inspiring one too, complains about student apathy all the time. Some people just shouldn’t be in college. Many would benefit from waiting to mature and otherwise be prepared.
I can’t magically make someone want to learn. I like the Chinese proverb that says a teacher can only open the door to the house of knowledge, he can’t make you enter.
I'm not convinced that that's true, in the US, anyway. There is widespread anti-intellectualism and contempt for education in this society. Funding for education except among the wealthiest schools is frequently cut. Teachers have to go on strike to get even small raises above their already small salaries, and are expected to work far beyond their miserably paid hours to create lesson plans, grade homework, participate in student extracurricular activities, and help students. At universities research and "publish or perish" are the priorities, and teaching is often seen as something to be avoided or delegated to TA's as much as possible. "Those who can't teach" is frequently bandied about. Teaching to the test, having to teach politician-decided curricula, or just babysitting students in class quite is common. Violence against both students and teachers is common.
In such a corrosive environment, is it any wonder that the most talented people might want to work in any of a number of lucrative professions, where they are highly respected and rewarded for what they do rather than go in to teaching, where they'll be held in contempt, paid a pittance, and possibly become a victim of violence?
It is my firm belief that there are a lot more talented teachers (or people who could be talented, inspiring teachers if they valued becoming such) than choose to go in to the profession, and many talented teachers who have quit the profession because they are just fed up with dealing with all of the BS and being treated like garbage. These people do exist, though, and the problem is not in having so few of them, but in the system being such that they don't want to go in to teaching or don't want to remain if they try.
"With a 100 students each semester I don’t have the time or inclination to find out about their personal struggles."
I completely understand that, and don't blame you but the system. But there is something that can be done about this. It's just that the school system and society as a whole is not doing what needs to be done: to invest much more money in to education, to make acquiring the love of learning and knowledge rather than teaching to the test a priority, to teach how to learn and not just what to learn, and yes, students' emotional needs have to be addressed. The violence we see in schools these days is but one symptom that they are being neglected.
"We are here to learn mathematics. If that is not true of a person then they shouldn’t be taking math classes."
With such a hands-off attitude, it is little wonder that so many students that don't already love mathematics or who aren't self-motivated enough to do the work are dropping out or failing.
"If a student, for whatever reason, can’t devote the required time to a course then they shouldn’t take it. The best teacher in my department, the most inspiring one too, complains about student apathy all the time. Some people just shouldn’t be in college. Many would benefit from waiting to mature and otherwise be prepared."
It would be wonderful if all students were self-motivated and love what they learn. But to leave it up to them to acquire such love and motivation will just result in many of them being left behind. Schools and societies just aren't helpless to have a positive influence on students in this regard, and we as a society would be better off if schools got more involved in fostering better attitudes towards education in their students, even if that means a greater investment of time, money, and effort.
"I can’t magically make someone want to learn."
It's not magic. It's a combination of passion for your subject and a skill of conveying that passion to others. I fully believe both can be taught. But even if they can't, there are people who have them, and there are ways to make the teaching profession more appealing to them.
You say it isn’t magic and seem to imply it’s easier than I think it is. Based on my experience I think this is naive. But maybe I’m jaded. Two students this semester told me I’m the best math teacher they ever had. One told me I’m the worst.
The "cure" is to recognize that you're solving the wrong problem.
Universities originated when there were highly motivated learners, actually interested in the material and taking an active interest in peppering the lecturers with questions.
Today, it's de facto purpose is to get a credential and network with useful people. Learning the material is almost entirely orthogonal to why they're there, so of course they're doing the minimum to pass (or receive a high enough grade).
Trying to get the students interested in the material is just digging the hole deeper. The answer is to stop digging!
Specifically: find a better mechanism by which people can network and signal their abilities. Leave universities to be attended by people who actually care about the material and who actually use it as an interactive experience for which it's best suited.
Then you're going to have fewer truly educated people than you could have if you didn't give up on them. Other societies with much better education systems than the US show that it is possible to bring more people aboard.
It will take a reform of the education system, but not a reform that caters to the lucky few who love to learn, but rather one that encourages the love of learning in more people.
1) Provide valid alternatives to credentialing (e.g. a good trade school path), so they've drained off demand for university-style credential.
2) Strictly limit who can go by a test, so you don't have people wasting their time there.
3) Strictly limit how much they can charge, so they don't compete over providing runaway bloat.
At the beginning of the semester I have around 35 students in the class. When I pass out the problem set I go around helping students with the problems. They typically get into groups of 3 or 4. Since I have a lot of students I can't waste my time on someone who didn't bother to even watch the lecture. It's not fair to those who did watch the lecture and need help.
I've never encountered a situation in which no one watched the lecture. I don't know what my response would be if that happened.
Recorded lectures and particularly flipped classrooms were a god-send for me the few times I had courses structured like that. I could rewind and go through what I just missed in videos if I zoned out, and the interactive nature of flipped classrooms really helped me focus and absorb materials in a way that doing homework by myself just couldn't.
Its disappointing that most students didn't appreciate this form of learning. I'm hoping that as the new generation of students (the khan academy generation) reaches college age, these sorts of techniques will become more accepted and easier to implement.
Overall I felt like this made the lectures more essential not less. In my other math lectures the professors mostly just explained the material in the textbook/notes that you could learn just as easily on your own. The applied learning style of the lectures for this course made each lecture unskippable if you really wanted to understand the material. The problems in the textbook didn’t come with any explanation for their solutions, and weren’t as similar to the problems on the tests and the problem sets as the problems in the lectures, so there was a lot of value lost if you missed a lecture.
For me personally, I prefer learning directly from the textbook so the videos were not that great, but the interactive lecture style is how I would want all of my future math courses to be taught, if I could choose.
I think those that say "he didn't even teach us anything, he just made us watch videos" are a bit out of touch with how learning works these days. You can find almost any resource online and read up on it yourself. That's how I've learned a lot of what I've done. Having a supplemental class period to expand on this idea is very important, and I think it's a shame some of my peers don't realize this. They expect you, the professor, to engrave it in their heads, but there is a shared responsibility here. Sitting in a lecture doesn't mean you're going to automatically understand the material; you actually have to think about what is being said. That's also why I liked my recorded lectures; I felt even more responsible for making sure I understood it before coming to class.
I would 100% rather watch a live person give a talk than burn out my eyes on another online video where I can't even ask real time questions.
Did they report spending more time on it than during the traditional lecture based course? I could imagine the flipped classroom ending up making many spend more time out of class on a course, which then makes it seems like the course forces the students to do all the work.
Of course, the work of learning is always done by the student anyway, but it's less obvious when a large part is listening to a lecture.
Potential solutions that I can imagine is to put in some traditional lectures, maybe denser at the start, so that you are seen putting in effort too.
Also, making sexy posters about the "new, revolutionary, methods being used for this course" could maybe change some of the incorrect expectations about what learning is supposed to be like.
But there are no shortcuts to learning! The student has to do all the work. The job of the instructor/course is to organize the material and guide the student.
I'm a soon-to-graduate CS student at an institution with an unspendably-large (in the billions) endowment, and yet the environments in which I've learned the most at this school, are those in which either (1) other students have been given the task of teaching me something or (2) vice versa. Notice the absence of traditional "classroom settings".
Many of my fellow students feel the most lectures we've attended felt futile. It's not that we haven't learned anything from them (quite the opposite), it's just that it doesn't feel like the most efficient way to transfer knowledge, given 3 hours and an assembly of Smart People.
Think – in what other time and place will you be able to assemble 30+ great minds, interested in a specific topic, and one of those minds is (hopefully) an expert in that topic? It feels like a waste, to assemble this magnitude of excellence and diversity, just for 1 person to speak for 3 hours. Obviously, the extreme alternative of chaotic 1-on-1 discussions between isolated friend groups would also be a waste – but it feels like there ought to be some goldilocks middle ground.
The lecture environment's shortcomings are mitigated by a highly-engaged and question-happy audience, but large lecture halls/class sizes, and strict curriculum requirements dis-incentivize (1) paying attention enough to ask good questions and (2) answering good questions with detailed and fascinating tangents.
A classmate recently shared this < https://www.recurse.com/ > and it continues to strike me as an enlightened approach to CS education, as it directly leverages the imperfectly-overlapping distributions of knowledge of the "students" to further collective education – an idea which makes perfect sense, especially at the graduate or nearing-end-of-undergraduate levels. Perhaps we'd be better off running college as a continuous, 4-year Hackathon? :)
But considering we retain 90% of what we teach, I decided to have a team of students give a lecture. For QA, the team would come into my office and give me their lecture along with student centered learning tasks they created.
They then lectured in the class. Other students were a lot more attentive and ask a lot more questions. The students who lectured really knew the material.
In some cases, students would come to my office and ask if they could give another lecture.
Later, I found out, a few students liked lecturing so much that they became teachers.
That's hilarious. Do you count that as a success or a failure of student-centered learning?
If only I would have known this simple fact in my chemistry lectures instead of trying to look through the book for what the teacher would test on. Yes I tested well but my understanding of the full concepts is not as expected.
That's been my experience, too. What I can't seem to reconcile is that it appears that very, very few people actually seem to do this, yet there are a lot of people succeeding in CS. So either they're all a lot smarter than I am since I have to spend so much time reading before I really feel comfortable with a particular topic, or they're all just fooling themselves and they don't really understand it that well.
- When these methodologies are applied at the college or graduate school level, you have a bunch of students who are experienced and skilled at learning in the traditional lecture format. Changing that up in the final years of their educational career is not always going to be successful.
- Anecdotally, many teachers report that less motivated students may fall way behind in alternative teaching methods.
- Not all teachers are adept at teaching using alternative or "flipped classroom" methodologies.
- When students have a bad teacher, the consequences of that are much much worse in flipped classroom than they are in standard lecture format. A bad lecturer will usually still get a certain amount of information across, but a bad flipped classroom facilitator can result in an entire class learning essentially nothing from a course. So there is significant risk to implementing alternative classroom methodologies.
this approach doesn’t scale, though.
It was 30 students, 1 lecturer, and a whole bunch of black board panels.
I think part of it was that it felt like a conversation, as well as a game. He would lay out the pieces (assumptions, definitions), and then point us in some direction ("now how would we show X?") We'd throw out ideas if we had any, and he'd either rebut us or nudge us in the right direction. I was 100% engaged in that class - no checking of phones or surfing the net - and it was just myself and my notebook, unlike in other classes that were slides-based and I picked up the bad habit of zoning out when something familiar was being covered. You can't do that in a conversation! The material and strategies I learned in that class completely built the foundation for my math major.
I am still not sure if math is one of the few topics you can take this approach for, slides are the devil, or if the lecturer was just secretly brilliant.
By engaging them in a dialogue you keep them engaged and focused on the material (or at least more of them than in a straight "speak at them" lecture). And by giving them a chance to answer for themselves, you're encouraging them to think (rather than merely commit things to memory or similar).
but basically I agree 100%
As a professor, I can say most professors don't like lecturing, but for some classes the alternative is to have small interactive classes, which isn't financially tenable for most universities for all classes.
So my reaction to these sorts of studies is "ok, then should we increase tuition to make up for splitting this 200-person class into 20 sections?" Even classes of 20 are too big.
I would like to change something about classes that still have a big lecture component but I'm not sure how to do that optimally. I think some of them could be done in an online format with videos, but I'm not sure if that's the best way either. Maybe if some small group discussions could be added?
There was another dilemma: am I here to be inspired or to find out what's going to be in the exam? (The most inspiring lecturers couldn't care less about exams.)
But that does take a lot of discipline and effort. It's not easy to do for every class you're taking, but sometimes worthwhile.
The article is a little slanted, IMO, towards tech understanding. My husband studied polysci. There are not many projects, and hands-on methods for getting all of that, and I would say that for MOST degrees. Tech, on the other hand, totally hands on, project based for me.
Every time I see people saying lectures are outdated, I cannot think of an actual STEM course where I was just lectured to outside of one Calculus course (for whatever reason we didn't have recitations for that one, and the professor was the sort to write and erase at the same time).
Is the problem with courses that are too dependent on lectures (as the predominant or majority time of faculty/student interaction) or is it actually that lectures are ineffective?
Even my later CS and math courses that were too small to have a TA had very interactive "lectures" even if we didn't code or do exercises during them (very Q&A oriented). Perhaps this is also a difference between different schools and the faculty at them?
EDIT: Reading more of the comments here I'm realizing that I only had a couple classes that were "traditional" lecture-oriented courses with the instructor speaking at us for the hour. The vast majority weren't and I think that's part of my confusion with the anti-lecture movement that's happening. I consider a lecture to be a dialog (because that's most of what I experienced) and not a monologue. I would agree that monologue lectures are boring and dreadful if that's the majority of what you encounter in a class or school. Now I'm wondering what schools did that. I went to several universities (spanning the gamut from lower tier-2 to top of the country) and only at the top school (GA Tech) did I experience a traditional lecture, and only for a couple courses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI
For more details:
Of course there is no one-size-fits-all teaching method. So the questions are when to use which. My hypothesis is that lectures are better for students who are well-prepared and well-motivated. If they want to learn the material and have the background, then give them the material efficiently. But for younger students with broader backgrounds, lectures aren't as effective. However, it's easier said than done putting something else in their place.