Hi Wendy:

i have been working as a professor for 11 years, and had the opportunity to teach on presencial, semi presencial and 100% virtual environments. As i have been learning more teaching techniques, i am more convinced that the less you lecture and use other technique, the better result you obtain from your students.

As every student has different ways to learn, we teachers need to work on more than one techniques to facilitate that. One is lecturing, but there are many others.

good luck!

Gustavo

Hi Wendy:

i have been working as a professor for 11 years, and had the opportunity to teach on presencial, semi presencial and 100% virtual environments. As i have been learning more teaching techniques, i am more convinced that the less you lecture and use other technique, the better result you obtain from your students.

As every student has different ways to learn, we teachers need to work on more than one techniques to facilitate that. One is lecturing, but there are many others.

good luck!

Gustavo

Thank you, Gustavo.

I do short mini lectures--for like 5 or 10 minutes and then have the students do an engaging activity that applies what I just explained. Then I do another short mini lecture--and again switch to a group activity that applies what I just explained.

that works great! :)

Thank you, Nancyruth.

I tend to forgo lecturing as much as possible to promote more active learning in my courses. When you think of the type of cognition that lecturing requires on behalf of the students, it’s always found among the lowest rungs of Bloom’s taxonomy. By promoting more active engagement with the course content—particularly through applying, evaluating, and creating with that knowledge—I can push my students towards more higher-order thinking. I really like what Krueger et al. (2011) suggest in that “giving up lecture time to incorporate targeted active-learning activities [engages] students and [makes] the remaining lecture time more productive and efficient because it could be used to connect ideas/concepts and clarify pre-identified points of confusion” (p. 6). I always attempt to connect current ideas/concepts to previously learned topics as well. My teaching is highly iterative in this way. It is important to keep in mind, though, that “there is an ongoing debate as to students’ preference for active learning versus lecture formats” (Cavanagh et al., 2016, p. 1). I think this notion clarifies the need to explicitly discuss your orientations to pedagogy with your students and define the reasons for which you choose more active learning over passive lecture. This is something that I do frequently.

Thank you, Reid. I wonder what type of assessments students who prefer lecture are participating in and what level of objectives they feel lecture really helps them to achieve in a given course.

Good question, Wendy. Somewhat intuitively, I feel that students prefer lecture not because it is a better instructional method, but because they have been socialized into the belief that college-level instruction is synonymous with lecture. Of course, it is difficult not to lecture when you have a class of 90 students, though there are ways around it. In terms of objectives, I don't think that students often think explicitly of what they're trying to achieve in a given course. Sure, they may look at a syllabus, but the learning objectives in syllabi are often ambiguous or unclear. I like what Nilson (2016) proposes as "questions that self-regulated learners ask themselves." I frequently engage my students in reflective tasks that require them to think about the meta-cognitive and meta-emotional aspects of learning, particularly as they relate to the objectives that I propose. This seems to make them much more aware of the purpose of learning and how they fare in terms of achieving that purpose.