Applying principles to your context

The most common challenge with respect to the lecture as an instructional strategy pertains to misinformation. A lot of people who don’t understand the research and therefore lectures draw a lot of negative press. There are faculty who pass the misinformation out to students who then think lectures are ineffective, and they shut down and tune out. So if we’ve got colleagues and students both thinking that lectures are not effective, it leads to problems.

Now, where does this come from? I don’t understand it. You know, these same students who think that lectures are not effective will sit through a two-hour movie and later talk about how impactful the storyline was and what they learned about their own selves from watching the movie. Some don’t forget that movie for years. Now, you can’t say that learning from a lecture is passive and therefore not effective, and yet sitting in a movie theatre and learning, well, they sound like similar things, don’t they?

Another example are students who will watch TikTok, Instagram, YouTube videos, and other content on their phone for hours and hours at a time. And later, then, they will show their friends their favourite ones. Somehow, they’re receiving this information and remembering it. So if you can receive information and remember it, actually, lectures can work pretty well. So advocating for lectures is definitely important, and it’s the narrative we need to change.

So the principles noted previously on establishing the outcomes for engaged lectures, capturing and maintaining student attention, activating prior knowledge, and establishing time for reflection, they’re not exclusive to learning strategy or the lecture strategy. These same principles apply in adapted form for any teaching strategy. And with these steps, it’d be appropriate to list the lecture, particularly lectures that tend to draw students into the learning process, such as discussion lectures and Socratic lectures. Well, those lectures should all be listed as engaged learning strategies.

Now, there are still those who claim students are passive during lecture, and that is simply not true as a global statement. There may certainly be some students who are passive. They’re not learning. But if they’re learning, it’s an active process. And it’s definitely possible to engage students in the learning process during a lecture, the same as it would be for any strategy you might use. But more importantly, think about the types of things that are similar to lectures. If you can draw students’ attention, or if students’ attention can be drawn from a movie, from a book, from a video game, then that process can work for lectures.

So our level of engagement is determined by what information we are processing and the extent to which it is perceived to be of interest. Learning can be as effective with a lecture as any other strategy, provided it’s done along the lines of the principles we’ve outlined in this course.