It is out of fashion to lecture and not to have audiovisual equipment, but I have no media enabled classrooms this semester. I am teaching four different classes, two of which I have never taught before, and I have many other responsibilities. So I take questions, I ask questions designed to foment discussion, I assign presentations, and I post materials on the course websites. But otherwise I lecture, because I need to save on preparation time. I have no fancy exercises at all.
Here are some comments from my peer observation: “Has an impressive command of this subject matter. Lectures in a conversational style with no lectern and no notes, making excellent use of the blackboard. Engages all students and creates a cordial, respectful atmosphere. Despite the informal style of presentation, lecture was deeply prepared, heavily structured, and very clear.”
When you take questions during lectures, you have to explain to all how they and the answers are connected to the main points. If it isn’t easy to do this without getting off track, you can create a list of issues that have come up on the board, that you want to get back to or speak to later on. There are a few other things you can do to make lectures go well.
Yet I could not lecture in the way I do on books or issues I have not seriously thought about with myself, and it is best if I have also spoken on them in some form before. The first good lecture I gave as a T.A. was the first time I gave a lecture on a subject I had studied for purposes other than teaching it — an author I was familiar with. I didn’t sit down and prepare the presentation, I thought about it while I washed dishes.
Still, when I was younger than I am now I usually presented with notes. Then it was handouts, and now (having skipped the era of PowerPoint, although I do illustrate heavily with media any time I have a media enabled classroom) it is with nothing in my hands. Even now, I have things fresh in my mind because of having just reviewed the materials I am posting to our course websites.
If you ever have to present or lecture on the fly, here is how: choose three key words and choose them well. Walk in and write them on the board. Say: “Good afternoon. We will be discussing these three concepts today, and here is why.” Watch the clock as you will only have ten minutes or so per topic if you are going to allow time for questions, discussion, and wrapping up.
Use phrases such as “as you will remember” to connect what you are saying now to things you have said in the past, and “this is important because” for a number of reasons including modeling the construction of interpretations. Write names, dates, and unfamiliar vocabulary on the board. If you think spatially at all (I do not appear to be entirely “visual,” but I seem to be “spatial”), sling up quick flow charts and diagrams.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
On the idea that class shouldn’t have lecture but only discussion — why? It really, really depends. A skills based class, needs to be a workshop, and a seminar, isn’t a lecture. Otherwise, I think the point of choosing a particular university and department is to get to hear that faculty explain their ideas about their subjects. Oder nicht?
Excellent advice, profacero!
More reasons to lecture in intermediate courses — native speakers from other disciplines, taking humanities requirements in Spanish or Portuguese on the theory that knowing the language and being authentic specimens will mean they will not have to read / write / think. When these people come from high school / community college and are thus NCLB victims and otherwise uneducated / semiliterate, they can be really loud, uninformed, and totally incomprehensible to everyone but me. I can ride herd on them and if I had unlimited time I could devise group exercises that they couldn’t easily ruin. BUT what student evaluations say is, I don’t understand that these types aren’t lost and don’t just not understand the material – they’re wilfully disruptive, trying to intimidate the rest of the class with their language abilities and play on my sympathies with their illiteracy. Evaluations suggest I use less progressive teaching methods not more, and assert my authority and my considerable knowledge much more.
@Undine, gracias.
I am more and more convinced that “student centered learning” is based on the idea that the instructor knows nothing about the topic, and has been created so as to make us all more reliant on textbooks, commercial websites, and things like this.
I suppose I can say this because of my disciplines: teaching is necessarily student centered in that they have to talk to me and each other, make original interpretations based on archival research, and so on.
I think of classes as study groups with a leader (me) but I think “student centered learning” means a classes work in groups with a commercial textbook while I do grading and technical support. In this context the objective is effective group work and not necessarily effective work with the material. That is good preparation for the corporate world.
So call me cynical, but I think I am more truly student centered than these ed biz types, even if I lecture
ALSO – what students say about it – it’s a relief because they need some orientation. Otherwise they have to just figure it all out themselves and they don’t progress / never feel secure.
I think response to lecture/discussion/group work varies in part according to the type of institution where one works. You once made a very useful distinction between “college teaching” and “university teaching” (it has nothing to do with the name of the institution). I think “college” students need and expect the structure of lectures, especially with cues like “this is important because.” They don’t trust their classmates to have anything useful to contribute (and so tend not to listen even when other students do have relevant observations), and they think they are there to find out what the professor thinks. “University” students are more accustomed to doing research, think of themselves as junior colleagues whose opinions are relevant, and are much more likely to work well together and learn from each other. At my large regional U, I have had some classes of “college” students and some of “university” students. The difficulty is that I can’t usually tell which I have until several weeks into the semester, and when I need to know is a few weeks before the semester, when I am making up assignments and planning the syllabus. Every time I plan for “university” with more demanding assignments and presentations, I get “college” students who can’t manage the work without incredible amounts of hand-holding, and when I dial things back for “college” students, I wind up with “university” students who really should get more challenging assignments. But they are all very legalistic about the syllabus, so I’m stuck with whatever I started with in the way of papers, presentations, research assignments, and so on. I just wish I could tell what sort of students I was going to get. I can teach either sort, but I need to begin as I mean to go on.
Yes, I have this problem, too, and my poor luck (I’m the type that rarely wins the lottery) means I usually guess wrong more often than not about what type of group I’m going to get.
My other big thing about it all is that the professors I had both as an undergraduate and in graduate school were all really famous. People would (and I still would) go to class because there you would find out what the really cutting edge work in field was — you’d be finding out from them what was going to be in their next book which was going to be the next blockbuster. *And* they would show you how to do research and so on, too. The criticism they got wasn’t that they lectured, but that they wouldn’t give you more than a C if you just regurgitated. Now, I’m not famous like that, so I see classes much more like study groups. And I used to have a complex from that experience, what right did I have to be teaching while non famous … but then figured out that I still know a f*** of a lot and shouldn’t withhold it (although one must of course speak to level and teach people how to figure things out on their own, etc.).
Here’s one of my old professors, lecturing with no notes and no Power Point:
I think you might have a skewed idea of what constitutes learner-centered classes. I teach, among many other things, pre-Columbian and modern Latin American art history, and last spring I taught the modern class as a problem-based class. I don’t quite understand your distinction between college and university as I went to a demanding liberal arts college, but under your classification my students are almost without exception ‘college’ students. There was one self-aware student who protested the problems approach because she claimed she preferred it when the prof ‘told them what they needed to know,’ but therein lies the real beauty of the learner-centered approach. Where else will they see how messy learning is? And how chaotic (at times) doing research is? And let me tell you – preparing for that class was every bit as challenging as it is for my more structured (lower division) survey classes, and it will take me quite a while before I feel like I know what I’m doing. Figuring out how to engage students to take the initiative in their own learning, whether they’re university or college students, is no easy task.
Welcome, MMayhall, and thanks for your comment!
– I think what I meant by college vs. university, originally, had to do with skill level partly, and also intellectual/research orientation or orientation toward mastery and licensing. I should look up the post in which I said that, and see what I think of it now. I’m unlike Dame E in that I don’t find lectures particularly useful the first two years, and I don’t give them in those courses. That may have to do with field.
– I appear to be different from many in that have almost never taken a course that wasn’t problems based and in some way learner centered, from elementary school forward. So, when people talk about the “new” student centered learning, it’s often something I’ve always done or sometimes, that my discipline has always done.
– I think the experts, content managers, and other staff people with Ed.D.’s the university hires now to make decisions about pedagogy, and the other consultants and book company representatives who make up the minds of this kind of administrator, do not realize that faculty actually have expertise in their disciplines.
– I also believe in giving people context. Having discussion and no contextualization just means they get their context from parents, high school, and commercial tv/radio. This I found to be true even when I taught at a demanding SLAC.
– In worst case scenarios I have noticed “student centered learning” is something you allege you are doing when you have students working together on some skill, supervised by a faculty member hired three days before who is really just administering a prepackaged course.
More thoughts re — “Where else will they see how messy learning is? And how chaotic (at times) doing research is?”
I agree, but when that is perceived as lack of clarity or “disorganization,” it backfires. I think you have to have some kind of order to appreciate messiness, the same way you have to have some sort of discipline before becoming cross disciplinary. Otherwise you just have mush, vagueness, and superficiality.
Remember, the students have messy lives, and the media and Facebook and everything are also very messy. And they’ve got a lot of prejudices and have heard a lot of rumors, and they don’t necessarily have any research skills. The different messiness of learning and research, and the ambiguities of knowledge and science, are things you have to give them training wheels for if they come from rote learning programs like NCLB.
I teach in foreign languages. Survey courses are at the beginning of the senior year, and specialized courses are later in the senior year and in graduate school. I prefer to teach the survey and below as problems based courses, and even the lecture-type format I’ve gone to this semester is problem based, not “telling students what they need to know.”
However, my point is this: it seems that in practice here, “student centered” and “hands on” means field trips and service learning. I’d say it was interpretation, archival research, reading and discussing primary texts, speaking and reading and writing in the language you are learning, interviewing each other and interviewing people outside class, etc., etc. – that is to say, what we’ve always done.
I don’t know. Someone told me I don’t understand these things because I was taught in such a pedagogically modern way myself. I also had really famous and interesting professors that I wanted to hear talk, because they were talking directly out of their newest research.
So yes, I guess my point is, I think the buzz word “student centered learning” often means something other than that. Another point would be, I seem not to realize how many people get up and drone on and then give students a test on that.