Friday, February 23, 2018

The dangers of lecture

This past week, I took a risk in my Workplace Writing class. The lesson concerned accepting constructive criticism, and it seemed to me that the most useful way to model it would be to let them criticize me. I put the students in groups and had them come up with a criticism jointly, so they would be more daring.

Only three groups of five were able to come up with anything. One criticism was that sometimes my voice is too quiet (something I wondered about with the room's weird acoustics), and another was that sometimes on Canvas the assignments are hard to find. The third was that they want to spend more time going group work.

From my perspective, they do group work ALL THE TIME. Every day there's an active learning activity, either individual or group. To clarify, I asked, "so it seems like I lecture a lot?" And the way they said yes made it seem like that should be obvious.

As I'm lecturing, I stop and ask the class questions, or have them ask me questions. From my perspective, that feels less like lecture and more like discussion to me, but it may not for them.

It's also possible that I've fallen into one of the dangers of lecture: getting carried away with talking. It's important to stop talking sometimes and turn control over to the class. Not just for a minute, but for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

My goal for next week is to begin with a group activity to make sure there's enough time.