Active Learning
35 Active Learning in Large Lecture Courses
Observe & Consider
The Large Lecture and Its Challenges
As Bill Costello, our guest undergraduate turned art teacher, shared with us in last week’s video, a common student perspective is that the typical undergraduate class “mainly consists of the professor getting up on the stage and giving variations on a PowerPoint.” This perception isn’t just shared by undergraduates either. In fact, in a 2008 survey of UW-Madison instructors conducted by DoIT Academic Technology, more than two-thirds of all respondents chose “Making lecture more interactive and engaging” as their number one teaching challenge from a list of 15 choices. In 2010, more than half (53%) of all respondents listed ”Making lecture more interactive and engaging” as their top teaching challenge, with another quarter (24%) of respondents listing “Providing students with practice or reinforcement” as their top challenge. It’s clear that both students and faculty are interested in injecting active learning activities and approaches into the traditional lecture, but it’s not always as clear how to best do this.
“Getting up on the Stage”: Making Lectures More Interactive and Engaging
Before we begin exploring specific practical ideas for reconfiguring the lecture, we want to stress that we don’t believe that lecturing itself is inhospitable to active learning. In this week’s podcast, you’ll even hear David Zimmerman offer a defense of what he calls “the humble lecture.” Students can (and do) learn from lecturing, and if you teach a course where lecturing plays an indispensible role in accomplishing your course goals, it’s important to prepare and deliver quality lectures, and to perform them in ways that fit your own personality and teaching style. It can also help to review some of what we do know about effective lectures. We believe that most effective lectures share a few common features, including the following:
- Variety: Most effective lecturers use a variety of instructional strategies and materials on different days and within a given lecture. This also applies to your own presentation style: as you vary the speed, the loudness, and the tone of your voice you send signals about the relative importance of different material in each lecture.
- Visual Engagement: Carefully selected visuals (whether projected or produced verbally through descriptive language and evocative storytelling) can help focus students’ attention and reinforce lecture material. This principle also applies to how you establish and use eye contact and move through classroom space: consider dividing the room up into four sections and practice periodically directing your attention to each of the sections as you lecture. In now infamous studies of how we communicate our feelings (which became the source of the oft-quoted 7-38-55 rule), Albert Mehrabian found that listeners perceive our body language and vocal delivery as far more important indicators of our