The Lecture as a Terrible College Classroom Tradition

Pre-Service professors are taught the content of their discipline and the research methods common to their discipline.  This makes sense as the primary career objective and the basis of employment in the professorate is published research in the discipline.  In fact, the value of professors is marked not by the quality of their teaching as by the degree of published reputation they bring to a school and the amount of research grant money they can generate for the school.   The former instance draws paying students and donors and the latter brings in additional hard cash.  Please to remember that first and foremost colleges and universities are business which in order to do education must be more than financially solvent. 

From the professors point of view, the research published in academic journals, where almost all research is published, is uncompensated, other than, if you wish, the prospect of obtaining and retaining employment and advancing in rank.  Books published yield little direct monetary compensation beyond reputation, which has a definite value in the publish or perish world of higher education but by itself cannot pay the bills.

With employment so keyed to uncompensated published research, teaching becomes the payable excuse to have professsors on the payroll without having to actually pay for their researching and for their research. It is quite understandable, then, that the preparation for employment in the professorate must concentrate on research methods in publishable areas of the discipline, but it is a wonder that there is a lack of actual teaching preparation.  Some “education” course work is undertaken acquainting prospective professors with the general history and sociology of the field and with a survey of learning theory and human development.  But actual methods are left unconsidered. 

Thus, when new professors begin to teach, they replicate the way they were taught largely without reflection on these processes.  As long as the newly minted are within the pedagogical cocoon formed by the consensus practices of their departmental and school colleagues, there is no need for them to delve into practice.  There is no need to fully understand what is being done in the classroom, what is actually happening to the cognitive development of students as content mastery is being accomplished-and what is happening in content mastery focused learning in the first place. 


The result of all this is for new faculty to fall into line with The Lecture as not only the predominant means of teaching, but the only way of teaching.  They were lectured course after course when they were students and thus they continue to lecture course after course when they teach.  Further, Deans and departmental Chairs, themselves "lecturers" are quite comfortable insisting on it.

As it turns out, the lecture is the easiest teaching method.  Lecturing essentially is teacher talk to students where the teacher having notated a selection of text beforehand places his/her notes on a board and explains their significance while students place the bored notes into copy books for later memorization. The talking to is then re-enforced through teacher selected text readings.  This process continues for a time and then the professor announces a test of the material placed on board and in notebooks and taken from the readings. 

The genius of this method rests in two facts:  1) students are relieved of most of the need to grow cognitive capacities; and 2) courses can saturate students with vast amounts of information. 

Lecturing provides students with extracted information the professor deems important focusing student attention on the isolated data point rather than on its meaning and implications to the contexts from which the data point was drawn.  Thus, learning here is limited to the memorization of the data point.  However, cognition grows not with the memorization of the data point alone but with the expansion in the ability to synthesize newly taken-in information with previously held to form an understanding of relationships between the data point and its context as well as the relationships between other data points and their contexts.  Memorization of data points by itself just is not able to grow cognition, but then the goal of the exercise in content mastery, the overarching and singular goal of college courses, is in the best memorization of as many data points as possible.  When I eventually took methods courses in preparation for high school teaching, I was instructed that content mastery, i.e. competency with any material, is defined as eighty percent correct on whatever exam is testing the learning of that material, that is, testing the memorization of data points.  And that is the case with higher education as well.

And as for piling it on, well, a professor can load it up if all he/she has to do is to talk to students.  Even if given a fifty minute period, which translates into forty teaching minutes, a professor can place data point after data point on the board even if writing slowly.  But, with the use of technology, first with overhead projectors and now with smart boards, the need for writing has ended with the result that even more data points can be presented to students. 

More and more one finds in the technological classroom there is less and less need for students to take notes as the teacher has already prepared notes for the smart board which he/she can easily duplicate and distribute.  On the one hand this relieves students of trying to actively listen and copy simultaneously, too frequently resulting in missed explanations or mistaken understanding of information, but on the other hand note-taking done right necessitates first understanding the points made by the professor which then is affixed in the students’ own way on notebook paper which results in a deeper understanding of the material under study.   Either way, with lecturing piling on data points and reading covering even more, students are overwhelmed by information with their minds only having sufficient capacity to memorize rather than to memorize and synthesize.  Consequently, I'd argue, contemporary lecturing cognitively stagnates students rather than growing them.  It has always struck me that the overall objective of higher education is in the realm of cognitive growth, in cultivating and maturing the reflective mind.   But, that is not on, especially at the undergraduate level.

Lecturing, then, is both the easiest teaching method and the least effective teaching method when the learning objective is cognitive growth and content mastery.  But since higher education is far more interested in faculty research than in teaching, it makes sense that the easiest road is taken as the easiest allows the simplest teaching/learning, data point collection, to predominate and by so doing gives time for the real job of the professor, research. Also, since lecturing relieves students of the struggles cognitive grow necessitates, it is the easiest teaching for students to handle.  However, students do struggle with the saturation of data points they have to memorize; still, taxing memorization capacities for most young adults is far and away more congenial than grappling with the ideas, concepts and propositions required for growing reflective capacities.

As lecturing is the consensus pedagogy for both professor and student year after year, it remains the pedagogy one copies and uses unquestioned throughout a professorial life.  In the end lecturing remains self-perpetuating.  However, my interest in teaching has always centered in the struggle to grow cognition, to move the minds of students.  Thus, lecturing was, for me, a pedagogy I did not embrace, a method only to be used sparingly if at all.  And this, as always, removed me from the consensus and placed me outside the cocoon.