As
I prepare to become a teacher, I find myself reflecting more and more on my own
learning experiences. I think of the strategies that worked and those that bore
me and my classmates to near-tears. A strategy that rarely worked for me during
my education is a lecture. In Bridging
English, Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (MM&M) acknowledge lectures as
one of four organizational structures for class time. Even though I loved
school, I had many reasons for hating lectures.
Lectures
meant blankly staring at the board and taking mindless notes. My teachers hoped
that I was engaging with the text and thinking about it, but in reality I was
thinking about lunch or passing notes to my friends. When I have something to
work on or need to focus, I am not easily distracted, so I can only imagine
that other people in my class were daydreaming too. Lectures were not only
interesting or engaging, but they were old. I had at least one teacher who
wrote the same notes on the board every year. She may have even used the same
yellowed notebook papered ones as her originals. I don’t know if it’s necessary
to explain what most students did:
“Hey
Leah, do you still have your notes from American Government?”
It’s
probably easy to conclude that I have a hard time accepting lecture as a positive
learning experience. However, the claim of its importance in the classroom has
caused me to, yet again, reflect on the possible value of lecturing. As I
explained, for me lecture was a process of “Here’s a fact, write it down in
your notebook and memorize it. There’ll be a test at the end of next week.” From
a student’s perspective, no good. From a teacher’s, an easy way out.
What
I found interesting from MM&M are the included rhetorical strategies to
make a lecture memorable: analysis, definition and classification, comparison
and contrast, and illustration. These go beyond the list of facts and regurgitation.
That’s what initially caught my attention, and I continued to think about the
benefits of a lecture structured in these ways. Essentially, lectures become
teacher-think-aloud opportunities. It’s a chance to show students what their
goals are when interacting with subject matter. We can show them how to make
comparisons between two texts or from text to self or how to analyze Shakespearean
language in a single sonnet. This becomes the first step in scaffolding:
students observing. After they have seen it down, they can perform the task
with some guidance and eventually they will be able to use the new skill on
their own.
The
work of MM&M has opened my eyes to the positive possibilities of using
lecture in the classroom, as long as it’s done correctly. Students need to be
interested, not given a list of facts.
