HOWTO lecture to students

Rob Weir writes in Inside Higher Ed on how to conduct a lecture that your students will actually pay attention to. Good advice -- I like this quote: "It's better to say a lot about a little than a little about a lot."

A time-tested way of engaging students is using a hook. Unveil a teaser, pose a question, tell a story, be provocative, invite brief brainstorming... any adult equivalent of "Once upon a time ...." Frontloading wonderment helps keep an audience. For instance, when I want students in my Civil War class to consider a stated objective about the link between ideology and historical memory I show a slide of King George III, George Washington, Benedict Arnold, Jefferson Davis, Abraham Lincoln, and Robert E. Lee. I ask, "Which figures can we pair and why?" For a lecture on the economics of the Salem witchcraft trial I hold up a shard of imported 17th century pottery and tell students, "This little scrap of crockery contributed to the death of 19 people in 1692."

Once hooked, proceed to the body. Illustrate the thesis, don't hammer it into submission. In days past I crammed as much detail as I could into lectures, which often led to confusion (and sore note-taking wrists). It's better to say a lot about a little than a little about a lot. Delving into a few examples makes for a more cohesive narrative. Make sure that everything in your lecture relates to the objectives and isn't just shoehorned in for the sake of being "comprehensive." The real skill in lecturing is how well you assemble and organize material, not how arcane, esoteric, or exhaustive it is.

Boring Within or Simply Boring? (via Kottke)

• [Anonymous]

  I always tell my students that I’m interactive–that is, I have acting training and can tell if they’re falling asleep and not with me. Also there are some tricks I learned in storytelling training that can gather attention.

• [Tdawwg]

  I’d simply advise one to simply cover one’s material in a lucid, thorough way. Worrying about how much the media-addled youth take away from our lectures and classroom discussions is a depressing, ultimately fruitless pursuit. Make them laugh if you’re inclined to do so: otherwise, do your job, preferably without resorting to new-media panaceas like Hamlet, the Video Game.

• [Pipenta]

  Zuzu,

  So everybody is a whore? How cynical. All interactions between human beings are about services rendered? About consuming products and customer satisfaction. How very contemporary American of you. How very sad.

  The only action in these interactions, as you’d have them, is that the one party hands over money, and the other party provides goods. The way you are envisioning it, it isn’t even a service.

  This is the very attitude that gets people into trouble when they go to a doctor and then sit there like a big fat passive lump and expect to be made well. Well, well, it doesn’t always work like that. You have responsibilities. It’s your body. You need to take care of it. And you need to educate yourself. Patients who don’t eat properly, even though they have the resources to do so, who don’t exercise, expect to be able to buy health in the form of a pill. They go to their doctors and demand pills. How very like most of my students.

  And when they do not follow through with the treatment, or the studying, they turn around and blame the doctor or the teacher? Yeah, there’s arrogance here and plenty of it. In these interchanges the doctor/teacher might have been arrogant, but the student/patient most certainly is.

  Arrogant and passive, passive, passive. I will sit here on my fat ass and I will swallow this pill, but only if it sugar-coated and only if you say pretty please.

  Blow me.

  I didn’t head in to this venture feeling cocky. I was very nervous that I would not know enough, not remember enough to teach these subjects well. I think I probably spent twenty hours prepping for that first class, I was so nervous. I can write. I’ve written for a number of magazines and a few newspapers and the feedback from editors has always been that I am clear as a bell. (Though this rant might well be pretty foggy. At my age, one doesn’t pop back from serious sleep deprivation overnight.) I’ve worked in sales. I’ve had PR gigs. I’m a pretty decent public speaker. I can usually make kids laugh. But I remember looking out at that sea of blank faces the first day and thinking “Holy fuck, these guys don’t even know what hierarchy means!”

  So I dumbed it down like nobody’s business. Wow, here I was teaching a university science class and I was putting together lectures at the My Weekly Reader level. And yes, I gave lectures. So sue me. I can’t figure out how to teach concepts like systematics and evolution and give an overview of diversity without having some lecturing in there.

  Sorry if I’m not a clever enough little monkey to teach without resorting to lecturing. But hey, my students point blank will not do any of the assigned reading. To take the consumer metaphor to its logical conclusion, I do not represent a high quality product. I don’t get paid shit. If I work out the hours I put in, compared to what I make, I would do much better serving up coffee at Dunkin Donuts. And I am still having to shell out for tuition. I’m just in a master’s program at this point. Nobody is paying my way. My students, as undergrads, are paying substantially less than I am. They are also paying about a third of what they would be paying at a real school. Real schools, you know them? The ones where you have to have done your homework and gotten halfway decent grades to attend? At this school, there are the students who are too broke to go anywhere else and there are the rich brats who have never done a bit of work in their lives. THOSE are my students. They drive glittery new cars, they have iPhones and their clothes and hair and teeth and skin are always perfect. And they are very, very arrogant. They look down their noses at the student with less money, the students who study.

  I don’t claim to represent all educators. I’m just one voyager in the academic ocean. But I was not alone in my nervousness about starting to teach. I’ve spoken to many teaching assistants and grad assistants and everyone was anxious about doing a good job. And I’ve had these conversations with established faculty and the new hires. Most are not arrogant. I do see a siege mentality. These people feel beat up. It is very, very trendy ditto head to have contempt for teachers. It is very much the fashion to have contempt for education in general.

  Anti-intellectualism is very much a part of our culture and I despite it. It is supposed to be elitist, to be an intellectual. It starts young. If you are bright, if you are curious and you like to read and learn, you learn to hide it, or you suffer the consequences. You get dragged down into that ugly crab bucket of American culture in which just-plain-salt-of-the-earth folks focus on important things like family(as if) and money (more like) and keeping themselves gratified and comfortable.

  Intellectuals are supposedly arrogant because they think they are smarter than everyone else. Here’s a new bulletin. Intellectuals aren’t smarter and they know they aren’t smarter. They just work at it. They just find joy and significance in learning. They just have a sense of responsibility that pushes them outside their comfort zone.

  But this attitude, which you have summed up so nicely, of instructors as whores (not even the wait staff) is very much what I have been facing. I hadn’t particularly planned on teaching. I knew I might at some point down the road, but not when it actually happened. And I did not identify as a teacher. I identified as a student. I was not a good student when I was younger. I had an abusive family life and I was one of those kids who was so busy struggling to survive that I didn’t do well in school.

  Coming back to school when I was well over forty, I had to teach myself how to study. I had NO IDEA. My classmates had youth and energy. The biggest advantage I had over them is that I have been through enough shit in my life that I could handle having my ego bruised. I could get knocked down and fuck up and fail, and then pick myself up and have at it again. And I was willing to ask questions, to look stupid in front of the class. This, it turns out, is a HUGE advantage. It makes up for the level of exhaustion I’m at for most of the term, every term. But I am not brilliant. It is not easy. I get good grades, but I work damn hard for them. And I am constantly reevaluating how I study and how I delegate my time. The workload keeps ramping up, so I have no choice but to become more efficient. It exhausts me physically and intellectually, but there is satisfaction in it. Some of that satisfaction is a grim machismo. I’m getting tough and I’m proud of that. But it didn’t happen overnight and I would not expect these undergrads fresh out of high school to work at anywhere remotely like this level.

  But fuck yes, I expect them to work.

  Coming from a place of not having been a good student, I thought I would have something to offer. I thought I could be empathetic and helpful. I’m an iconoclast first last and always. I was going to be on their side. So the reality of the situation, the reality of the culture of the students, left me gasping.

  I was such a sucker at first, then I was bombarded by the cons, the lies, the bullshit. And then I, too, had my war stories with the rest of the TA’s and GA’s. The students who are manipulative narcissists have taken over the classroom. Something about the way education has changed must have allowed the noxiousness to really ferment.

  I think the most educational thing for these kinds of students would be for them to teach. I think it would be an instructive experience for everyone who scorns teachers and who thinks education is a product.

  Let’s see how you feel the first time a student calls you a whore. And they do, they do. Let’s see how you handle it when your best efforts (which would doubtless be so much better than mine because you are such a clever little monkey) are ignored and scorned.

  The folks who teach put up with this crap, and they pick themselves up and go back and try again. They stay and they fight the sea of aggressive ignorance because they believe in what they are doing. They believe in the importance of education. They love their subjects. And they know how important it is the break up this circle jerk of collective narcissism.

  Teaching is tough. I’m not sure I’m going to make a career of it. I’d rather do research, thank you very much. But along the way, if I have to teach, I’m going to do my best to figure out how to get something of that which is important in biology across to the kids. Biology is important. I am sure of this. You would doubtless call this arrogance. The customers know best. The customers know that the latest episode of American Idol is more important than the vast diversity of living things.

  The folks who teach really well? Get down on your fucking knees because they are practically saints. The folks who do a halfway decent job? You owe them MUCH respect. And those of us who are mediocre, who are struggling, a bit of respect in our direction might make the job easier. I know you don’t want to give that up. I know you value your scorn very highly. But if there was more support for teaching, more value placed in education, the student might just walk out of the classroom with something worthwhile. That is the whole point, isn’t it? Not getting into piddling matches about the social hierarchy.

  If you teach, you believe in something. That is what keeps you going. It sure ain’t the big bucks, the bling and all the props you get, cuz hey, you don’t get them.

  I suspect that most of you who think that educators are whores putting out a product wouldn’t last a week in the classroom.

• [Tdawwg]

  The “student-as-customer” metaphor is one of the prime factors for education being as fucked as it is currently, Zuzu. I work for my university, not my students. My students work for themselves and for me, by doing the assignments I give them according to the standards I set them. Ultimately we both work for larger ends, like “truth” or “culture” or some such other hard-to-quantify goal. That money has changed hands during the delicate social transaction we call education does not, must not, empower our students in the ways that traditional consumers can be and are empowered. To fail to understand this reduces the educational experience and the delicate social matrices in which it thrives to so many “This hamburger has ketchup, I want another” customer complaints. The student is only “right” in the context of the assignments we give them, and while we need to preserve their “rights” in order to maintain a stable, welcoming, pluralistic, blah blah learning environment, they’re emphatically NOT equal partners in the teaching-learning process, nor could they be: they’re students!

• [Anonymous]

  “The real skill in lecturing is how well you assemble and organize material, not how arcane, esoteric, or exhaustive it is.”

  God, yes. I don’t know how many professors I’ve had who just kind of ramble and are later completely surprised when the class has no idea what the take-away message was. Give me a time line, a thesis, the time period, the idea…whatever it is that the lecture is structured around and then actually structure the lecture around it.

• [bardfinn]

  Who else learned to hold an audience by watching James Burke? Show of hands?

  “media-addled youth”, fah. I wouldn’t even sit through a boring lecture on conlang.

• [dane]

  I tell my students that both they and I have paper hats on, and the authors we are reading are simultaneously our customers and our employers.

  When they find out I actually believe this, it discourages recourse to the “You’re my employee” talk.

• [leviathan]

  The consumerist argument only works in the context of a private institution. For many of us who work in higher education in places like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia, as well as the United States, the cost of a university education is heavily subsidized by the state–even with the whopping fees in the UK, students only contribute about 1/3 of what their education actually costs. Therefore, as I see it, my responsibility ultimately rests with the public: my job is to make sure that I put a rigorous process in place that allows students who are prepared to do the work, the opportunity to develop a high level of skill in a subject area that–in some (in)direct way–contributes to social improvement.

  The ‘I pay for my education therefore I am entitled to x, y, z’ is actually a very destructive mindset to the provision of quality education. By transferring market logic to a public good, it turns education into a crude commodity to be bought, sold, and/or traded rather than a right that entails a process of learning through mutual effort and work. An education isn’t a happy meal or a packet of gum: you don’t get to hand your money over and get immediately satiated by the end product (i.e.,a degree). Unfortunately, in the two countries I have worked in that have instituted significant rises in tuition fees, this mindset creeps in very quickly.

  Despite all the rhetoric, the provision of education turns away from the process of learning, providing high quality teaching, or skills development. It becomes firmly focussed on the result, the granting of a degree, with a final GPA or classification that allows one to pursue his/her professional aspirations. Students expect to do well regardless of their abilities, the quality of their work, and attendance (or lack thereof). Since they supposedly pay my salary, it doesn’t matter that a significant percentage of them rarely do the reading, miss lectures regularly, sit through tutorials without making a single contribution, and submit work that is completely incoherent. Thanks to the consumerist mindset, if they don’t do well, it is obviously my fault: the logic is since they paid, they should get the degree.

  This doesn’t mean though that students should be forced to endure shitty and disinterested lectures. However, it also means that lecturers– and other students for that matter– shouldn’t have to endure shitty and disinterested students.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  The origin of the lecture was that the instructor had the only copy of the text and thus dictated it to the students.
  Lecturing without reinforcement doesn’t work. That is, you have to stop at intervals and ask questions and take questions. It also aids in getting a feel for whom you’re lecturing to and what they’ve got down and what they’re having trouble with.
  It helps to keep raising the bar. Teachers who lower it retain very few of the dullest students and lose the best of the brightest.

• [Darwindr]

  I agree totally with the commenter on the original site that advocates team based learning and case studies. I use these extensively in my first year biology lectures, no matter if I’m teaching a class of 65 or 250. Telling stories in an engaging way is great, but getting the students actively engaged in teaching themselves and each other is a wonderfully useful technique, which is why I do both.

• [Karl Jones]

  When you find a kid who wants to do stand-up comedy, it’s not a bad idea to encourage him/her to do the necessary in college to get a teaching certificate for L.A. or NYC. They’re basically doing 6 shows a day, clocking out in time to hit the clubs–and it beats waiting tables.
  - #6 Anonymous

  Very interesting, thx! Mod +1 Insightful.

• [Pipenta]

  Wow, this thread hits close to home. I’m a middle-aged grad student and I haven’t gotten enough sleep in, oh, about six weeks. Pardon me if the following is not entirely coherent, but I just have to post on this subject.

  I taught for the first time this term. I taught the lab sections for introductory zoology and botany. For me, it was a very educational experience. For my students? Maybe not so much.

  I’m at a third-tier state school. My students are not science majors. I made the mistake, the first day, of going around the room and asking them why they were taking the course. The response I got, again and again, was that they HAD to take it. Yeah, like they HAVE to be in college.

  They don’t work. They are not curious. They believe they deserve a grade just for showing up and it had better be an A. They absolutely believe it is a yet another burger they have purchased, or that daddy has purchase for them. And me? They consider me the counter help. I’ve had kids snap their fingers at me like I’m a waitress. There are days when I wish I could spit in their food.

  No matter, they spit in their own food.

  As consumers, what they want is a good grade and also a degree please, and a good job waiting for them when they get out of school. They do not want to work. They are not curious. They are not passionate. They are very interested in themselves and each other and not much else. They all seem to be majoring in ME ME ME.

  I was warned by the other teaching assistants about how bad it was going to be. I did not believe them. I’ve taught before, just not in an academic setting. I thought I was pretty good at teaching. Ha. I’m good at teaching people who want to learn. That’s a different kind of skill.

  I tried all kinds of approaches, and yeah, the kids pay a bit more attention if you mix it up and have them do the hands on stuff, but not much. Team-based exercises are a way for slackers to exploit their classmates. Team exercises are grand for teachers who are willing to sacrifice the bright and motivated students to make the overall results look better. Screw that.

  It would be great if I was clever enough to come up with absolutely brilliant ways to teach each class, but I’m not. I had about a week’s notice before I started teaching and I was scrambling. I really threw myself into it. My students did not.

  These kids have been taught a line. They haven’t been taught study skills. They haven’t been taught science, but they have been taught a line of bullshit. They can’t think analytically, but they will spin a yarn about, gee whiz, how much they’ve learned and how interesting it all is. They do not mean it at all. They are bored and hostile. It is a line that only shows up in their papers. It’s crap they are regurgitating. Whatever else they’ve learned in high school, they think they know how to give the teacher a blow job on paper. It makes me want to go to those high schools and have at those teachers with a blunt object.

  I listen to the faculty argue about how to teach these students. I find myself siding with the old-school guys, much to my surprise. Because a lot of what the new approach seems to be is dumbing it down and asking less and less of the students.

  At some point, these kids are going to have to step up and work. The buzz is that this particular class is worse than any previous group. In two of the three sections I teach, the majority of the kids are failing. I was horrified when I graded the first exams. I was shocked. I had made the exams so easy. I went to the department head, just reeling. What I learned was that all the sections for two of the other lab instructors were also failing. The department head basically said, Pip, it ain’t you!

  I’m not a boring lecturer. I am passionate about the subject. The students don’t ever ask questions about biology. They don’t even ask what is going to be on the exam. They do ask “Is this for credit? How many points does this count for?”. Is this the result of the whole No-Child-Left-Behind program? I don’t know.

  I wonder if they have souls. I could bring a giant squid into the class and they wouldn’t even get out of their chairs to walk over and look at it. I could offer up Cthulu himself in a vat of formalin and they’d just yawn and text message their friends about, about, nothing. They spend more time doing their hair, more time at the tanning salon than reading.

  A friend of mine came to watch me teach. He was horrified by the class, by the number of times I had to repeat the simplest things over and over. He said I was clear as a bell, but the kids just weren’t paying attention. And this was the review for the final, this was as motivated as they got all term.

  We are students too, my friend and my fellow lab instructors. It’s an ugly contrast when you put your own studies on the back burner in order to painstakingly prep for a class for students who will not work. You learn to give up sleep. My idea of fun, of taking a break from the work of being a teacher, is to squeeze in time to do my own school work. And I am managing A’s, thank you very much. I’m not brilliant, I just work at it.

  As a student, as a consumer (gack!), I prefer old-school teaching. The best teacher I have is a mile-a-minute hardcore bionerd. You come out of one of his courses and you feel kind of black and blue in the most wonderful way. You’ve really worked, you’ve really learned something. If I don’t understand something as he blasts by it in lecture, I read up on it on my own. I look for other sources of information. I only go back to him if I get stuck. My students, in the meantime, are like baby birds, they expect me to chew up their food and spit it into their mouths. But then they don’t even swallow the food, they just drop it on the floor and wander off. But by gosh, they are offended to the core if I don’t make the effort so they can ignore it.

  As a student, I HATE working in teams. You just end up carrying the slackers. I loathe the gee-whiz-water-is-wet exercises that are all the rage. They might be dandy for grade school, but at the university level they are insulting, boring, and a fat fucking waste of my time. Teach me, yes, show me what I need to know and then get out of my way and let me get on with it. None of this goddamn hand holding. Treat me like an adult, not like a halfwit child. I can blast through classes like that and get a high A in a fraction of the time that my REAL (old school) classes take me. But I hate them. I don’t learn shit. They are make believe that wastes time and money and waters down my degree.

  When I dumb down my classes, I see despair in the eyes of those students who do study, who do care. I am sickened when I pander to the lowest common denominator. It is especially galling because it is not a matter of what they CAN do, it is a matter of what they are willing to do.

  I am constantly tweaking my teaching style and experimenting. I will continue to do so. I do not like the results I have gotten, not one little bit. But the thing is, I’m not an entertainer. Students have responsibility. An education is not a product that is passively consumed, it is a job. You need to work at it.

• [Tdawwg]

  Huzzah, Leviathan, huzzah!

• [Karl Jones]

  On the other hand, we also had the worst lecturer in the Uni, who was going to be dropped if he didn’t get his scored up. He really really knew his stuff, but he was just not a good teacher. He resorted to offering “extra points” to students who would actually actively particpate in classes.
  - #1 Spikles

  In my class, grade points include “classroom participation”. I got the verbiage from a senior teacher, a full-timer (I’m adjunct), but the idea I got from experience: classroom participation is part of the deal.

  I don’t call them Extra Points, because it’s not extra, it’s a percentage of the total points, because I value participation, and I reward it.

  Now, I don’t live and die by the points — that’s just a tradition which I employ as I go about the upleasant business of assigning grades. And while I value classroom participation a lot, I don’t necessarily penalize the non-participants: I try to recognize that some students are shy, or disabled, or truculent and proud in a dignified way, or whatever — but if they attend lectures and do the work, then they’re good students, they make the grade.

  I make efforts to encourage classroom participation: I get really animated, and walking among the students as I lecture, and dashing back to the teacher’s workstation to throw another example onto the big screen, and telling jokes and so forth.

  Also, I do the Zen master bamboo-cane routine. If I want to restate a point, I’ll sometimes burst out in parade ground tones: “Pop Quiz! if I wanted to X, what Y would I Z?”

  Bottom line, I hope I’m not a boring fop, or whatever ailed that Uni lecturer.

• [Karl Jones]

  Never forget that you work for them. The customer is always right.
  #15 Zuzu

  So true!

  I repeatedly tell my students, in various ways: I work for you. Part of your tuition goes into my paycheck, so I’m your expert consultant. You’ve paid for this classroom time (it’s a night class), so you’re entitled to a percentage of my classroom time, and you can stay as late as you want on most any given class night and ask me anything.

  Then again, most of my classes have heard my Pirate Ship speech, which I typically follows some occasion when I call for a show of hands about what the class should do. It goes like this:

  “The classroom is not a democracy. We are not equals here. I’m the teacher, I make the rules. The classroom is rather more like a Pirate Ship. I’m the Captain, I make the rules; but if the crew mutinies, the ship goes nowhere, or worse.”

• [Karl Jones]

  (But you also need to answer my questions on-demand during the lecture.)
  #15 Zuzu (redux)

  But of course!

  Questions-on-demand is the best part — the really stimulating, challenging part — the growth experience and personal development part — the having fun and entertaining people part — the teaching people about themselves part — the taming lions barehanded in arena your soul part of lecturing!

• [Karl Jones]

  A lot of lecturing skills are true for all speaking skills. Involve your audience… People will like you and want to listen to you, as long as you relate your subject matter back to them.
  #4 urshrew

  Well said. It’s all about people, about loving people, and courtesy and respect, and paying attention to others, and answering their questions in their own voice, so to speak … speaking to others in their own language, their own idiom, their own soul.

• [Daemon]

  #16 – It’s not a metaphor. It’s a statement of fact. The student hires the university, and thus all of it’s employees, to provide them with an education. The teachers are subcontractors. They are employeed by the students precisely because the organization they work for is.

  What screws up education is when teachers forget that they are being paid provide the best possible instruction to a group of people who have paid a lot of money to be there. Note: ‘best possible instruction’ specifically doesn’t mean doing whatever the students want.

  Students know that a certain amount of hoop-jumping is to be expected, but they should be able to count on the teacher to actually be good at their job.

  An engaging lecture is an effective lecture, and increases the chance that the students will want to continue in that field.

• [zuzu]

  Subjects of study are called “disciplines” for a reason, no? Students enter into an unequal relationship for the purposes of learning from an expert who knows more, thinks better, etc., than they. Trying to equalize this relationship, or, worse, trying to imbalance it in favor of the student-as-customer, is insane.

  What arrogant bullshit — typical of the university system.

  The same is true when you hire a doctor, or a lawyer, or a plumber, or an electrician, or a car mechanic. What makes a professor so special? Explain how you’re not a whore, just like everyone else. Like it or not, you, via the university, are a client of the paying student; and if they don’t like what you have to offer, they’ll take their business elsewhere.

  Are some students believing that they’re paying for an effortless degree? Sure, but to use the car metaphor, some people want to buy “The Homer” (where the horn plays “La Cucaracha”).

  But other people buy the superior engineering of a Porsche or a Toyota.

  The problem with focusing on a degree is both endemic to the university system itself, and the way it’s been subsidized by popular appeal. We’ve created a path dependency, originating in compulsory public schooling, where we’re led to believe that no one wants to learn on their own — we have to be led by the nose. Moreover, outside of private consulting, try getting a “professional” job without an undergrad degree — no matter how smart, talented, and knowledgeable you are, and no matter how stupid most people who attain that degree by bullshitting are. (Although fortunately this is changing for the better; though more of government subsidies of existing education institutions will likely undermine that change.)

  I’ll argue that we need a portfolio-based system, where potential hiring parties look at your actual body of work, to assess whether they want to hire you to create other new works for them.

• [Tdawwg]

  Bardfinn, “Fah” right back at you, then! Kindly understand that unmotivated, proudly ignorant students are as much responsible for “boring” lectures as the so-called “boring” lecturer. Teachers aren’t in the classroom to be entertaining or funny: we’re there to teach. You can presumably entertain yourself elsewhere, no?

• [funwithstuff]

  @30: I’ve found that university guidelines for the amount of time that should be spent on a course are at best an average: the amount of time an average student should invest if they want to come out with a perfect result.

  Less time == lower grades, but many students just want to pass. More capable students may not need to put in the same amount of hours to get the same results.

  At least here in Australia, most full time students also have full or part-time jobs — a serious impediment to spending 40 hours on study. Unless students are financially supported in their studies, they just aren’t going to have the time to do enough, and standards will inevitably slip to keep the pass rate high.

• [zuzu]

  So everybody is a whore? How cynical.

  The culture, in the United States at least, could use much more cynicism. (Generation X was right.)

  All interactions between human beings are about services rendered? About consuming products and customer satisfaction. How very contemporary American of you. How very sad.

  Except that I’d put a spin on it that it’s about return on investment (i.e. profit, but that’s also perceived as an “ugly word”). …point being it’s not about mindless consumerism.

  Consider the personal computing revolution, Free Software, the maker culture, open-source hardware, amateur radio, and the rising DIYbio phenomenon. Consider the rise of the “creative class” and “knowledge workers” rather than “full-time employees”.

  These “prosumers” are mavens at doing market research, knowing what they’re looking for in their purchasing decisions, and doing the best due diligence to maximize the exercise of their resources and abilities. (Echoes of R. Buckminster Fuller’s “dymaxion” concept, perhaps.)

  It’s precisely not about submitting, like an employee (or “organization man”), to “paying your dues”. It’s more akin to entrepreneurship; living your life as if you must manage You, Inc. It’s integrative learning, where a professors must compete for students like the sophists of ancient Greece.

  I think the issue I’m attempting to tease out is the problem of the institution of university. It’s just another corporate entity, and it’s become, in a way, deified as a superorganism to be beholden to. Just as hospital has detracted from the practice of medicine, or nations have detracted from the value of the individual.

  At the same time, I want to reiterate my earlier implication that the customers in question need not be as stupid as you assume they all must be.

  (In fact, cost-based structure is backwards, it’s the price signals from end-users up the supply chain that is the correct order of events. As a business person, you don’t collect a profit from your customer; you collect it from bargaining with your suppliers. The customer has told you what they’re willing to pay, and it’s up to you to solve the problem of how to satisfy their want for that price. Or don’t, and someone else will.)

• [Quibbler]

  It’s always been a popular excuse for students to blame lecturers for their own lack of interest in a subject.
  This is even more true now with the much larger proportion of students in higher education.
  Many students have little of no interest in the subject that they are doing they just feel they need to collect qualification, and are often too thick to get into more exciting courses.

• [wolfiesma]

  There are no easy answers to anything when it comes to the business of education. Where to start?

  I’ll just offer up an example of a new innovation in education, at the preschool level, that I would really love to see employed on a much larger scale. PBSKIDS.ORG, noggin online, nick jr. online. You would not believe the variety of high quality games that are available free (pbskids) or for a very low fee (noggin online.) The games are incredibly engaging and get at all the basic literacy skills that we spend such huge sums of money trying to teach. I wonder how many learning disabilities would evaporate if kids were given the chance to manage their own learning in their own homes using fun interactive computer based curriculum?

  I would love to see more investment in very high quality educational material. Why doesn’t the education department fund more documentaries, with the tests already made, with discussion questions already spelled out? Teachers should be able to pull off the shelf high quality curriculum that engages the students and sort of step back and just facilitate the learning process.

  Computer-based distance learning needs to be the wave of the future, don’t you agree? Look at the potential with youtube, TED, etc. You find the lectures given by the most talented and experienced teachers in the world and have the students learn from them. Why must we reinvent the wheel in every single classroom the world over? Find the best, package it in an online format, and offer it at a fraction of the cost of a seat in a sit-down school.

• [apoxia]

  Well I think the approach outlined in the original post sounds great. From a psychological perspective the storytelling aspect will help retrieval due to enhanced context and thus greater neuronal connectivity. I’d rather lectures be thought-provoking than fact dispensing.

• [Spikeles]

  I remember this one lecturer we had at University for our Database course, she was awesome. She knew her stuff, and wasn’t afraid to say she didn’t know something, didn’t mind students asking questions, willing to help students out of lecture time, fun, likeable and loved to laugh.

  On the other hand, we also had the worst lecturer in the Uni, who was going to be dropped if he didn’t get his scored up. He really really knew his stuff, but he was just not a good teacher. He resorted to offering “extra points” to students who would actually actively particpate in classes.

• [funwithstuff]

  I’ve taught at university and technical college as well as in smaller training sessions for professionals, so here’s my 2c.

  1. A large chunk of first year students don’t really know why they are there. Many of them decide they shouldn’t be, so the second years and onward tend to be more involved. Therefore, first year lecturing can be pretty unrewarding.

  2. On the other side of the coin, I certainly remember some bad lectures when I was in first year — many lecturers simply showed up and read the notes verbatim. I ended up attending 2 hours a week and reading the notes myself. The response the next year wasn’t to make the lectures better, but to make attendance compulsory. Oops.

  3. Realise that your expectations or your students are likely based on your experiences as a student. Since you went on to become a lecturer, you were probably at the top of the class and are *not* representative of the average student. Lower your standards.

  4. One big thing that has changed in university since I went through in the earlier 1990s is that students go to university expecting a job. This is a mistake. Students, please:

  If you want to be trained for a job, go to technical college.
  If you want to learn how to think, go to university.

  Teaching at both, the technical college did a much better job of teaching both design skills and use of software. The uni did a better job of broadening horizons. Pick your path accordingly.

• [leviathan]

  To Pipenta at 22:

  Hang in there! Keep on doing what you are doing. Every so often you will get blessed with a student or group of students that will give you some hope that the world may just avoid becoming an idiotocracy yet.

  To Zuzu at 27:

  I’d have to respectfully disagree. I may be a ‘whore’ if you want to use that kind of language because I take pay for providing a service, but as a lecturer I am not a ‘client’ of the student. The general public is our shared client. My duty is to ensure that I am providing a quality level of instruction so that students–as Funwithstuff notes–learn to think. The student has a duty to seize the opportunity that this investment provides and to put in the effort to learn. When students demonstrate that they want to learn, most people I have worked with will go to the wall for them to make this happen. The point is that if both parts of the covenant are filled, it hopefully leads to beneficial spin-off effects at the societal level, repaying the initial investment made by the state and tax payer.

  I would agree with the portfolio idea because, in part, it would give students an opportunity to illustrate myriad strengths and skills developed at university. Unfortunately, at least in the UK, most prospective employers don’t even want to see transcripts from graduates. They just want to know the degree taken and the degree result–sort of similar to a GPA in other systems– obtained by the student. And in the end, a large percentage of students only care about doing the bare minimum in order to receive the result that employers desire (typically a 2.i or the rough equivalent of a B average in other systems).

  To Funstuff at 29:
  I agree that most lecturers were not typical in their past lives as students. However, at least in the UK, the standards are imposed from well-above. Thus, for a typical course of one term in length (20 credits over here), it is a legal requirement that students be given 200 hours of work, divided up between lecturers, tutorials, and independent study (reading and assignments). We are told to aim for a ratio where every hour of instruction should be supplemented by 4 hours of independent study by the student. With full-time students taking three courses a term, this is supposed to work out to approximately 40 hours of instruction and independent study a week. I assign slightly less than this and still field complaints that I am too demanding. I couldn’t figure it out until we surveyed students in our department. When we asked how much they were actually doing, the vast majority admitted to only spending 5 hours a week or less across all three courses. Moreover, they felt that anything more than 10 hours a week of work across three courses was too onerous. And keep in mind that this is at a research intensive uni with some of the highest undergraduate admission standards in the UK.

• [Karl Jones]

  I’ve been teaching Dreamweaver (the software, not the song) at a technical college in the Twin Cities (Minnesota) area for ten years now.

  One thing I discovered right away: teaching is a performing arts skill.

  In years past (not so much today) I spent a lot of time at open stages and coffeehouses, doing the guy-with-guitar singer-songwriter routine. In the process, I learned how to work an audience — how to keep people entertained — which came in very handy when I started teaching.

  Tell a joke! Have some fun! Make ‘em laugh! That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

• [teufelsdroch]

  How to lecture:

  Don’t.

• [foop]

  I’m no longer involved in teaching, but about 10 years ago I taught at a UK university. I’ll happily admit that I wasn’t anywhere near the best of the lecturers there, but I like to think I wasn’t in the bottom third.

  At the time, student fees had just started up and so I guess you could claim that the students were our customers. I’d like to have seen you try that line with the people in charge. We were there to do research. Research brought in money. Research contributed to our HEFCE grade, which in turn determined how much funding we got. Research employed post-docs and PhD students who generated more research, which got more money.

  The students just got in the way of the research.

  An ideal situation? Definitely not. But that’s the way it was. And as our course had an applications/places ratio of around 10:1 most years, that was unlikely to change because of student pressure.

  More cynicism: I don’t know what the vast majority of students were there for, but it certainly wasn’t to get an education. A lot were there to get a qualification that enabled them to earn lots of money. At least they made a bit of an effort.

• [urshrew]

  A lot of lecturing skills are true for all speaking skills. Involve your audience. People hate being talked at, in any social situation (I don’t count online blogging and commenting, since they have too many differences), so just check in every once and awhile and let your audience you still remember they are there. Please, also do this when talking to your friends, loved ones and acquaintances. Hell, do it with people you just met. People will like you and want to listen to you, as long as you relate your subject matter back to them.

• [Tdawwg]

  Um, no, it’s a metaphor. The student doesn’t “hire” the university so much as pay fees to have the privilege of attending classes and learning. It’s not like we professors are so many lawn-care-maintenance specialists working for so many clients, or so many lawyers handling so many legal cases, etc. We’re employees of the university, which has entered into a financial relationship with students, sure, but to state that teachers are “hired” by students is wrong at best, harmful at worst. This crazy metaphor is one of the biggest contributors to student entitlement, which is one of the most destabilizing forces in education. If you don’t like your McDonald’s hamburger, fine, return it, complain, etc.: as a student in my class, your rights are significantly lesser.

  The problem with a lot of your reasoning is that you’re equating students’ feelings about their work, courses, professors’ performance, etc., with objective data on the same. They’re not the same, though. Students are, by definition, ignorant: the idea that they can rationally and fully evaluate professorial performance, while it looks nice on teacher contracts and on university websites, is flat out false. They don’t know the subjects, they’ve never taught, and many of them are hormonally-driven illiterates more interested in the vagaries of teh Facebooks than the intricacies of reading a difficult, resistant text, more apt to act out in class than contribute in a valid fashion. I’m certainly interested in how my students feel about my performance, but so much of this data is subjective, personality-driven, subjective, etc.

  Subjects of study are called “disciplines” for a reason, no? Students enter into an unequal relationship for the purposes of learning from an expert who knows more, thinks better, etc., than they. Trying to equalize this relationship, or, worse, trying to imbalance it in favor of the student-as-customer, is insane.

• [zuzu]

  , “Which figures can we pair and why?” For a lecture on the economics of the Salem witchcraft trial I hold up a shard of imported 17th century pottery and tell students, “This little scrap of crockery contributed to the death of 19 people in 1692.”

  Ugh, I hate that dog and pony crap. I don’t want call-and-response. Just explain the damned thing; don’t play games with me! Don’t waste my time! (But you also need to answer my questions on-demand during the lecture.)

  While I’m a huge fan of James Burke, as Bardfinn mentioned, it’s not because of his “look at this transformer, it caused a blackout in NYC” method (which he uses sparingly, IIRC). It’s his “revisionism” / narratives, and their conclusions, that I find compelling. (Supposedly that’s the reason researcher/professors are worth learning from.)

  I agree totally with the commenter on the original site that advocates team based learning and case studies.

  “Team-based” learning means one person in the group does all the work, and everyone else ditches. We need to stop this fad of excessive focus on team-building in mass-education.

  Students are already far too over-socialized. More independent learning is required. More individual research projects, perhaps.

  It’s always been a popular excuse for students to blame lecturers for their own lack of interest in a subject.

  Never forget that you work for them. The customer is always right.

• [Anonymous]

  i think there’s a big gap between what the professor considers a good lecture (what felt good for him, what looked like a successful lecture to him) and what makes the student go “wow, that was a good lecture.”. it doesnt mean he’s doing well just because the students are laughing/reacting to his lecture.. from what ive seen, the most appreciated teachers have been calm ones who are serious and don’t get any reaction from the students..

• [Caroline]

  “It’s better to say a lot about a little than a little about a lot.”

  My advisor phrases this as “It’s better to uncover something, than to cover everything.”

• [Anonymous]

  “One thing I discovered right away: teaching is a performing arts skill.”

  Karl Jones: The converse is also true–which is why when you find a kid who wants to do stand-up comedy, it’s not a bad idea to encourage him/her to do the necessary in college to get a teaching certificate for L.A. or NYC. They’re basically doing 6 shows a day, clocking out in time to hit the clubs–and it beats waiting tables.