The Skillful Teacher

part of discussion seminars and written assignments.
Assessing Your Lecturing
Probably the best way to improve your lecturing is to see yourself
lecture. There are several ways you can do this. One is to use the
Critical Incident Questionnaires your students complete to explore
what it is you are doing that students find helpful or hindering. A
second is to invite a colleague you trust into your classroom to
observe you lecturing. You should instruct that colleague as to how
she can be most helpful by letting her know the things you would
most like feedback on (such as the clarity of your explanations, your
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ability to project to the back of the lecture hall, your appropriate
use of examples, your pacing, your ability to encourage student ques-
tions, your use of eye contact, or your variety of vocal modulation)
as well as anything else she feels you should know. Peer observers
should be careful to let you know what you did well as well as what
needs to be improved.
But probably the most useful approach is to arrange to have
yourself videotaped as you deliver a lecture. It is relatively easy to
arrange this and, as long as you don’t roam too much, need not even
involve someone else to operate the camera. Videotaping yourself
allows you to become aware of your visual and verbal tics that you
may be unaware of but that students find annoying. If videotaping
is not feasible, you can make an audiotape of your lecture and listen
for ways to improve your pacing, pitch, and delivery. In my experi-
ence there is nothing more dramatic or revealing than seeing your-
self give a lecture on tape. Sometimes it is embarrassing but it is
never less than instructive.
In my own case videotaping made me aware of lifelong habits I
have struggled to break: looking at the floor or in middle distance
while explaining a particularly difficult point, and answering ques-
tions with mini-lectures that are often far too long and meander-
ing. On the other hand videotaping has also underscored my
determination to include plenty of practices that seem to play well
on tape. These include providing frequent autobiographical exam-
ples, programming time for student questions by deliberately allow-
ing silent, reflective interludes, and finishing my lectures by raising
questions about, and pointing out omissions in, the comments I
have just made.
Lecturing Creatively
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7
F
or teachers who prize participatory learning, discussion is the
jewel in the crown of the engaged classroom. It appears to equal-
ize student-teacher power relationships, to affirm the validity of stu-
dents’ opinions, to get learners used to grappling with diverse (and
sometimes contradictory) perspectives, and to encourage students
to take responsibility for the development of their own judgments.
For some of its advocates, classroom discussion has an even wider
political resonance as constituting a democratic learning laboratory.
Indeed, the subtitle of a book I co-authored—Discussion as a Way of
Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms (Brookfield
and Preskill, 2005)—illustrates my own belief that discussion-based
classrooms can help prepare learners for the process of participatory
democracy. Social philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas (1992)
argue that the same basic rules of full, free, and equal discourse that
govern good classroom discussion constitute an ideal speech situa-
tion that can also be applied to judging whether or not the wider
community is reaching its economic, social, and political decisions
in a fair and morally defensible way. For him good discussion, and
therefore good democratic process, depends on everyone con-
tributing, on everyone having the fullest possible knowledge of dif-
ferent perspectives, and on everyone being ready to give up their
position if a better argument is presented to them. The adult edu-
cator Eduard Lindeman ([1945], 1988) anticipated Habermas,