Lecturing and daydreaming: what happens when students have no decisions to make?
Image: Jamain via Wikimedia Commons
A few months ago, I spent several days at a conference on a topic that holds great intrinsic interest for me. I signed up for the conference, eagerly anticipating meeting new people and being challenged with novel ideas. I had never attended the conference before and had few preconceived notions about the format for presentations. However, because most of the scholars were in the humanities, I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing many tables of numbers or hearing about esoteric statistics!
What I wasn’t prepared for was being read to. Over the course of several days, almost every speaker read their presentations from pre-prepared scripts. In one typical session, the first two presenters held their papers with two hands, looked up occasionally, and put the paper down only to change the PowerPoint pictures. They read well, using inflection and pitch to emphasize important points, but it was still a word for word matching of oral presentation to the text. The third presenter had a script but had done a better job in memorizing it, as she made occasionally made eye contact with us and did a fairly good job of disguising the fact that she was reading.
As I always try to do in conferences, I had made a point of sitting in the first row, so I could see the slides clearly and also have a clear view of the presenters’ faces. I found that being able to see faces helps me catch meanings I otherwise might miss when I don’t hear all the words.
Despite my advantageous location, where I should’ve been in the thick of the action, there wasn’t any. I found my attention wandering, and to stay focused, I tried taking notes of the key points that I heard. As often happens, my notes quickly became observations on the format of the presentations and not just their contents.
Why couldn’t I stay focused on the content?
Frequently in such situations I find myself lamenting the lack of presentational skills by the panelists and speculating about what it must be like to sit through one of their classes. But in this case, I turned the focus on myself and asked why I wasn’t doing a better job in playing along with the role of an “audience member,” which is apparently how the presenters saw me. Then I realized that I didn’t want to play that role anymore.
Instead, I wanted to do something. I wanted the presenters to ask me questions, to solicit my feedback, and to force me to puzzle out where they were going next. Alas, their one-way talk left me with no options — no decisions to make. I had been forced into a thoroughly passive role.
If there was to be action, I needed to force it myself. I started writing down objections to what was being said, but because the presenter had left no space for such diversions, whenever I wrote something down, I missed a part of the presentation. Because the presenter was reading from the text, and redundancy had mostly been edited out, missing a few sentences often meant I lost the thread of the argument.
Colleagues who know me well will recognize that, once again, I’ve found another provocation from which to push my case for active learning! The situation in which I found myself was very much like that of our undergraduate students in classic lecture based classes: an instructor does 90% or more of the talking while students passively try to record in their notes as much as possible of what has been said. The few questions asked of the students are mostly rhetorical and only answers that conform to the a priori expectations of the instructor will be followed up.
Why do such situations make me so unhappy? Why was I so disappointed with the presentations I heard at the conference? I think it is because the presenters had made no allowance in their plans for bringing me into the session as an active participant. Just as instructors who rely heavily on one way talk give their students no decisions to make, as an audience member, I also was expected to simply absorb what was being offered rather than let the speaker know that I actually understood – – or not – – what was being said.
The decisions offered to me could have been simple ones: the presenters could’ve asked for examples of what they were talking about. The speakers could have offered several alternative scenarios that completed their narrative and then asked us which one we thought was the most plausible, and why. They could have purposefully constructed an alternative counterfactual scenario and then asked us why it didn’t occur.
My point is straightforward: when humans are put in situations where they are simply being talked to, with no opportunities offered for them to engage their higher order cognitive powers, they will struggle mightily to stay engaged with the material. I recently read a blog post by a scholar who works with online courses and who noted that she had viewed some amazingly well produced videos. However, within one week, she had completely forgotten their contents! The slick videos had given her no role to play in her own instruction.
The natural cycle of human attention is quite short, but it is further truncated when people are asked to play only passive roles, as audience members. Daydreaming is a more likely outcome than deep learning!
Howard E. Aldrich is Kenan Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His book, An Evolutionary Approach to Entrepreneurship: Selected Essays by Howard E. Aldrich, was published in 2011 by Elgar.
Work in Progress 
Howard,
I find the implications of your astute observations quite serious. How can we expect expect students to be advocates, leaders, and the active participants of a democracy when they have gone through fours years of being socialized to be passive. Students mistakenly think they ate accomishimg something by passively taking notes. Yes, as faculty, lets act on your message of requiring students to engage action learning. Thanks for your post.
Patricia Thornton
Pat, thanks for your kind comments. I admit to vacillating between two extremes. I’m heartened by the growing attention to active learning techniques, such as the flipped classroom, in which instructors spend most class time having students work through problems in small groups. The instructor circulates, acting as a coach or guide, rather than as a lecturer. At Carolina, the natural sciences have made real headway in adopting this teaching strategy. I’m discouraged by the slow pace of change in the Academy. From visits to classrooms and discussions with my undergraduate students, most of whom are taking courses across a wide range of departments, I’ve learned that lecturing is still the dominant modality and “content deliverer” seems to be the way that many faculty still define themselves.
I blog a lot about this issue, I guess, because my optimistic side thinks there’s still time for change.
Howard and Pat (if I may), I fully agree with the points raised in the post and in the comments. Yet, in your last comment (above), Howard, there seems to be an underlying critique of academics not wanting change. That is probably not what you mean with the “slow pace of the Academy”.? The call for a ‘flipping’ of the classroom might not be suitable for all programmes, and also there might be structural problems, such as the size of programmes and the design of rooms and buildings. I find the lecture still works well for large modules as it is an effective way to convey information in vocal form – maybe augmented by slides, pictures, bullet points, etc. – And I have doubts that a video-record of the same lecture is as effective in conveying the same information – but have no evidence for either other than that I find it difficult to follow video-recorded lectures that have been prepared and delivered for a live audience. It would seem that for novel forms of the delivery of teaching material academic institutions would have to invest in staff – not only training but also numbers of staff to allow for smaller class sizes – and in time and other resource, such as the creation of online material made for watching, listening, reading, etc. on a computer, mobile device.
Dirk, excellent points! Let me respond to 3 of them. First, I actually DID mean to imply that many academics ARE slow to change. I’ve seen this often in my work (in teaching workshops). Walk around your campus — peer into classrooms, and notice the VERY high % of the time that the instructor is talking, and the very few real opportunities that students have to decide something. (I’m referring to ‘traditional’ classrooms, of course.) Second, we have a LOT of research on the superiority of active learning methods for achieving higher-order learning, in the Bloom’s taxonomy sense. Stand & deliver lecturing has its uses, but they are much more limited that people realize. Third, yes, it is true: new forms of pedagogy require more staff and more staff training. Here at UNC, the natural sciences’ departments have hired new staff, invested in training, and rewarded people for using the new modalities. A department chair told me that when faculty are hired now, they are explicitly told that they are expected to use active learning, especially in large classes.
Howard, I think by and large we are in agreement here. Active learning and interactive methods work well in many cases; lecturing has its uses. At many universities the staffing and space problems might be difficult to overcome though.
Howard and Dirk,
To Howard’s point the implications are that good students think they are doing the good thing by being passive bottoms in the seats and the results are students’ skills for engaging mentally and taking action atrophy and don’t develop. These skill are essential to being successful. Can you imaging for example a passive entrepreneur? This problem is an old one that was recognized in the early 1970s, John Sperling for one in founding alternative educational institutions because the academy would not change or even accept “Rebels” who wanted to do so within its hallowed halls. I do see change happening the technology that enables action learning. I see the technology is not equaled distributed in the university. Teaching in both sociology and business, the professional schools have it to a much greater degree.
Pat