Abandon lectures: increase attendance, attitudes and attainment

Donald Clark’s blog

In a recent debate with Stephen Downes, I spent some time going through dozens of papers and meta-studies showing that the lecture is a largely disastrous pedagogic technique, devoid of formative assessment, diagnosis of student understanding, actual teaching or inspiration.

I wasn’t surprised at the qualitative nature of Stephen’s response, as I’ve heard it many times before 1) that lectures are not about ‘teaching’ but ‘showing practice ’i.e. what it’s like to be a physicist, whatever, 2) some lectures are good e.g. Martin Luther King’s speech etc. and 3) lectures must be good as they’ve been around for so long.

I don’t buy any of these arguments as 1) that’s not what lecturers or students think, expect or require, 2) the fact that a chosen few can do something well (like surgery or any other form of expertise) doesn’t mean that it should be done by everyone 3) slavery was around for millennia but it doesn’t make it right – you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. [..]

Academics will go to great lengths to defend traditional lectures [..] However, there comes appoint when the evidence [..] must win out. This paper points towards something that decades of research have confirmed, that there must be a rethink on lectures. We may then have a chance to dramatically change teaching in Higher Education for the better, also making to cheaper. In other words, get good teachers to teach and let researchers research.