Introduction to engaged lecturing

Hi, Todd Zakrajsek again, welcome back. Now, this course is going to be dealing with engaged learning. And overall, what we’re looking at is lecturing. So what comes to mind when you think of a college lecture? Most people don’t think of engagement. But did you think of boring, monotone, maybe a person pontificating, dull, passive? Those terms come up all the time when we think of lecture. Now, why is that? Why not come up with terms like engaging, interesting, modeling thinking, and even stimulating? We’ve all heard really good stories that we find extremely stimulating. Why can’t lectures be the same?

Now, as humans, if we’re exposed repeatedly to something, we tend to think of those things as the best or the worst of times, depending on our overall response. So for instance, if you’ve had a car, and the best of that car has been a wonderful car, you think of the car is exciting, fun, uplifting, and maybe useful. But overall, if the worst of times, if the worst things happened all the time with that car, and it breaks down and it’s not reliable, when somebody asks you about the car, you might say, well, it’s expensive, undependable, frustrating, and time-consuming. What’s the difference? The difference is what you’re overall thinking of as the best or the worst.

So in lectures, we tend to think of bad lectures that have happened in the past, So we think of them as dull and monotone and awful. But you’ve also had some really good lectures. And that’s what we really want to focus on in this class. How are we going to see that students are experiencing good lectures? So aside from what you’ve heard in the press, I think it’s important to know that there’s no such thing as an inherently bad lecture. There are bad lecturers out there, but the lecture itself is not what’s bad.

Now, I’ve read the foundational studies from the 1990s to present. And if you look closely at all of those method section, something amazing appears. Have you ever heard the phrase active learning is more effective than lecturing? Active learning is more effective than lecturing. That would mean if we did a study, we would look at active learning courses and lecturing courses, but that’s not what happens. What happens in these courses is that the courses are broken down so that there is some lecturing along with the active learning, and then the other class has all lecturing. That’s what’s being compared.

So there isn’t a difference of all lecture, all active learning. It’s active learning with lecture, and lecture alone. And the studies have shown the same thing over and over and over again. Students in a class with a mixture of active learning and lecturing do better than individuals in a course where you lecture all the time. Now, that’s what’s most important. It’s not that active learning is better than lecturing. It’s that lecturing is better when active learning is involved. In this course, when we look back at all of the stuff that we’re doing, you’re going to see that you can deliver lectures that are informative, engaging, and promote student learning. That’s what we’re going to do.