Maya Angelou, politicians like John F. Kennedy Jr. and Ronald Reagan,
preachers like Martin Luther King Jr., and teachers like Richard Feynman.
Today we live in a golden age of spellbinding speaking, where great orators
engage and educate from platforms with unprecedented reach. Creatives
used to share their methods in small communities; now they can accumulate
enough YouTube and Instagram subscribers to populate a small country.
Pastors once gave
sermons to hundreds at church; now they can reach
hundreds of thousands over the internet in megachurches. Professors used
to teach small enough classes that they could spend individual time with
each student; now their lessons can be broadcast to millions through online
courses.
It’s clear that these lectures are entertaining and informative. The
question is whether they’re the ideal method of teaching. In the physics
experiment, the students took tests to gauge how much they had learned
about statics and fluids. Despite enjoying the lectures more, they actually
gained more knowledge and skill from the active-learning session. It
required more mental effort, which made it less fun but led to deeper
understanding.
For
a long time, I believed that we learn more when we’re having fun.
This research convinced me I was wrong.
It also reminded me of my
favorite physics teacher, who got stellar reviews for letting us play Ping-
Pong in class, but didn’t quite make the coefficient of friction stick.
Active learning has impact far beyond physics. A meta-analysis
compared the effects of lecturing and active learning on students’ mastery
of the material, cumulating 225 studies with over 46,000 undergraduates in
science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Active-learning
methods
included group problem solving, worksheets, and tutorials. On
average, students scored half a letter grade worse under traditional lecturing
than through active learning—and students were 1.55 times more likely to
fail in classes with traditional lecturing. The researchers estimate that if the
students who failed in lecture courses had participated in active learning,
more than $3.5 million in tuition could have been saved.
It’s not hard to see why a boring lecture would fail, but even
captivating lectures can fall short for a less obvious, more concerning
reason. Lectures aren’t designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement;
they turn students into passive receivers of information
rather than active
thinkers. In the above meta-analysis, lecturing was especially ineffective in
debunking known misconceptions—in leading students to think again. And
experiments have shown that when a speaker delivers an inspiring message,
the audience scrutinizes the material less carefully and forgets more of the
content—even while claiming to remember more of it.
Social scientists have called this phenomenon the awestruck effect, but
I think it’s better described as the dumbstruck effect. The sage-on-the-stage
often preaches new thoughts, but rarely teaches us how to think for
ourselves. Thoughtful lecturers might prosecute inaccurate arguments and
tell us what to think instead, but they don’t
necessarily show us how to
rethink moving forward. Charismatic speakers can put us under a political
spell, under which we follow them to gain their approval or affiliate with
their tribe. We should be persuaded by the substance of an argument, not the
shiny package in which it’s wrapped.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting eliminating lectures altogether. I love
watching TED talks and have even learned to enjoy giving them. It was
attending brilliant lectures that first piqued my curiosity about becoming a
teacher, and I’m not opposed to doing some lecturing in my own classes. I
just think it’s a problem that lectures remain the dominant method of
teaching in secondary and higher education.
Expect a lecture on that soon.
In North American universities, more
than half of STEM professors
spend at least 80 percent of their time lecturing, just over a quarter
incorporate bits of interactivity, and fewer than a fifth use truly student-
centered methods that involve active learning. In high schools it seems that
half of teachers lecture most or all of the time.
*
Lectures are not always the
best method of learning, and they are not enough to develop students into
lifelong learners. If you spend all of your school years being fed
information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t
develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.
Steve Macone/The New Yorker Collection/The
Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast
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