Why Are Lecturing and Questioning Still Around?
The lecture is 800 years old (Lecture).
Teachers questioning students is millenia-old.
Yet these staple instructional practices while criticized–often severely by pedagogical reformers are alive and well in charter schools, regular public schools, and higher education. And they exist amid a revolution in teachers and students using high-tech devices in and out of the classroom.
Are these ways of teaching simply instances of traditional practices that stick like flypaper because they have been around for a long time–inertia–or have these practices changed with the times because they are useful ways of communicating knowledge and learning?
LECTURE
Lecturing has been panned by pedagogical reformers for decades. Over and over again, critics have said that lectures are inappropriate because students forget the facts and learn better when they interact with teachers. Furthermore, with so many high-tech ways of presenting information, prepared talks are obsolete. Yet lecturing remains the primary way professors teach undergraduate courses, high school teachers present information, gurus, and officials across business and government communicate with followers (e.g., TED talks, podcasts, U.S. Presidents speaking from the Oval Office).
If lecturing is so bad for learning and seen as obsolete, how come it is still around? Surely, it is more than inertia or hewing to a sacrosanct tradition of transmitting knowledge. With new technologies and media (e.g., the printing press, television, computers) no longer is the familiar (and medieval) dictation of text to students necessary. Yet the lecture persists.
As Norm Friesen argues (see The Lecture ) , the persistence of the lecture as a CONTINUE READING: Why Are Lecturing and Questioning Still Around? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
