A Thought on Lectures

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.