The Value of Lecture

Students and teachers among Viewpoint readers might be interested in a column at the New York Times by Molly Worthen, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina. The column is about the value of lectures in college classes, a topic about which there's quite a diversity of opinion.

After introducing her essay by quoting some instructors who eschew lecture in favor of "active learning" and think others should, too, Worthen writes:

In many quarters, the active learning craze is only the latest development in a long tradition of complaining about boring professors, flavored with a dash of that other great American pastime, populist resentment of experts. But there is an ominous note in the most recent chorus of calls to replace the “sage on the stage” with student-led discussion. These criticisms intersect with a broader crisis of confidence in the humanities. They are an attempt to further assimilate history, philosophy, literature and their sister disciplines to the goals and methods of the hard sciences — fields whose stars are rising in the eyes of administrators, politicians and higher-education entrepreneurs.

In the humanities, there are sound reasons for sticking with the traditional model of the large lecture course combined with small weekly discussion sections. Lectures are essential for teaching the humanities’ most basic skills: comprehension and reasoning, skills whose value extends beyond the classroom to the essential demands of working life and citizenship.

I wonder how many critics of lecture have in their minds a picture of something like a prof I had as an undergrad who, at the beginning of class, would sit on his desk, pull a lectern in front of him, and proceed to read his lecture from a series of blue books in which the lectures were recorded word for word.

This, I know, is how many scholars at professional conferences present their papers, and it's pretty much a waste of time for the listeners who could simply read the paper for themselves.

Worthen continues:

Those who want to abolish the lecture course do not understand what a lecture is. A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture “places a premium on the connections between individual facts,” Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. “It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”

Absorbing a long, complex argument is hard work, requiring students to synthesize, organize and react as they listen. In our time, when any reading assignment longer than a Facebook post seems ponderous, students have little experience doing this. Some research suggests that minority and low-income students struggle even more. But if we abandon the lecture format because students may find it difficult, we do them a disservice.

Moreover, we capitulate to the worst features of the customer-service mentality that has seeped into the university from the business world. The solution, instead, is to teach those students how to gain all a great lecture course has to give them.

It is indeed hard work to listen to an hour-long lecture, but the discipline it instills and the skills it develops are immensely valuable.

Listening continuously and taking notes for an hour is an unusual cognitive experience for most young people. Professors should embrace — and even advertise — lecture courses as an exercise in mindfulness and attention building, a mental workout that counteracts the junk food of non-stop social media. More and more of my colleagues are banning the use of laptops in their classrooms.

They say that despite initial grumbling, students usually praise the policy by the end of the semester. “I think the students value a break from their multitasking lives,” Andrew Delbanco, a professor of American Studies at Columbia University and an award-winning teacher, told me. “The classroom is an unusual space for them to be in: Here’s a person talking about complicated ideas and challenging books and trying not to dumb them down, not playing for laughs, requiring 60 minutes of focused attention.”

For my part, I don't think 60 minutes of non-stop lecture is particularly efficacious. The instructor needs to pause from time to time and let students digest what they've heard, to be questioned and to ask questions. Their opinions on the issues under discussion should be solicited and challenged and students should be encouraged to defend their views.

Many students, unfortunately, either have no questions or opinions or are reluctant to voice them, but those who do, learn.

One of the dismaying aspects of this approach, though, is that students frequently expect their opinions to be accepted tout court and to be immune to challenge. If the prof does press them on their view, or evinces some disagreement, students sometimes interpret this as a sign that they're not free in class to voice their thoughts. In other words, they see having their views challenged as a form of "put-down" when, of course, it's not that at all. It's simply an attempt to prod the student to sharpen his or her arguments, to express them in a rational fashion rather than simply emoting, and to think more deeply about what they believe.

Worthen goes on to talk about another valuable discipline: Note-taking. This is a skill that, for whatever reason, fewer and fewer students seem to have developed in high school, but in my opinion it's one of the major keys to student success in many college courses.

There's much else of interest to both teachers and students in her column, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.