Reply to Anyone else surprised by the amount of lecturing in humanities classes at T10 universities?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Anyone else surprised by the amount of lecturing in humanities classes at T10 universities? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Same college professor here again.  Believe me, I know about learning by lecturing vs. other methods.  What it really comes down to is that learning is the student's own transformation, and they have to play an active role in order for it to happen.  That active role can be doing preparatory reading and taking notes in the case of a lecture, working hands-on in a lab, role-playing in a clinical discipline, teaching something to someone else, or even just plain old writing a paper.  It is my job to plan, to organize, to prompt, to assign, to explain, to demonstrate, to assist, to support, to challenge, and maybe even (if I am lucky) to create some curiosity.  But there is nothing I can do in the classroom that can actually make someone learn if they don't lift a finger themselves, and that comes way before any debates about appropriate course format.

The real catch is that lecture is the one structure that _doesn't_ collapse when students are unprepared, and college students right now are unprepared most of the time.  Yes, you can high-wire things by marching them forcibly through a painful "discussion" about things they have not read, but that rarely inspires compliance, and doing that stunt more than once is a waste of everyone's resources (including the people who are paying for those hours of class time).  You can devise in-class exercises that engage students in "learning" even when they have not done their pre-work on the material, but ultimately the amount of learning that happens under those circumstances is minimal, no matter how engaged the students may seem to be.

Want to know how to get your student to succeed in college?  Have them do their reading.  Every day, for every class, in full, ideally while taking a few notes. (The quantity of reading they are assigned now is way less than you were asked to do when you were in college.)  That is the starting-point for their transformation.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics