What feels like good teaching and why

I haven't felt very satsified with my teaching this term.

Ironically, although the level of student preparation here isn't, collectively, as high as that at Former College, I actually like teaching these students better, for a variety of reasons, so it's not that.

It's just that I used to feel like I was doing a better job than I do now. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what's different here, and what am I doing (or not doing) that I do when I feel more successful. There are a number of things I've been thinking about, but I've realized that one of the problems is adjusting to lecturing more frequently again.

The biggest difference from my previous teaching is that at my current institution, there are fewer class meetings in a term, but each class meeting is quite long. It's really nothing more than two short classes back to back, but it means I have to think more consciously about varying what we do in each class meeting. One way to mix things up (not the only way, but one way) is to throw in some lecturing to break up the blocks of discussion (usually one worries about breaking up blocks of lecture, not the other way around, but I find that almost two hours of straight discussion is a little much for students, too).

Another difference is that my classes here are quite a bit bigger than my classes at Former College. They're by no means huge, but they're at least one-half again to twice as big as what I've taught for the last three years. I taught classes this size at Rural Utopia all the time, but I think I have to make a conscious effort not to see these classes according to the light of Former College, and to stop thinking of them as "big" classes. Because I associate "big" classes with lecturing, and while these classes are definitely not so big that I can't run discussion, I still find myself lecturing more than I used to.

Thing is, I have a kind of love/hate relationship with lecturing.

The first time I taught a course of my own, in grad school, it was an evening course, two-and-a-half hours at a time, once a week. I'd TAed a lot by that point, which in my grad program meant running discussion sections, so I was perfectly comfortable with classroom management and leading discussion by then (not necessarily brilliant at, but comfortable with), but I'd never spent any significant time lecturing. With a 150 minute class, I had to lecture, just for variety - while I prefer discussion-based teaching, I think asking students to discuss for 150 minutes is just about as cruel as asking them to listen to me for that long.

And I remember that what was most disconcerting about lecturing was that I had NO idea what the students were thinking. I administered midterm evals that first term because I really needed to get a sense of what was going on in the course, and was kind of stunned to find that by and large, students were happy with the course and thought my lectures were just fine. It wasn't that I'd had any evidence that they hated me/the course or were totally lost; it was just that I really didn't know.

It's really hard to tell what people think of lectures. Some students are those lovely people who watch intently, visibly respond, laugh and frown when they should. And other students are those that doodle, look out the window, stare at the floor, look blank, doze, or give you that slightly skeptical, slightly perplexed look every so often.

Thing is, the latter students may be just as engaged and interested as the former. I know, because I'm a terrible audience. I doodle, I gaze out the window, I don't think that as a student I looked like I was paying an iota of attention - but I was. And I know from past experience that some of the students that look the most physically disengaged are some of the ones who are enjoying a class most. But when I'm teaching those students, I always assume they aren't engaged, until I'm given evidence to the contrary.

I'd kind of forgotten this element of teaching bigger classes and lecturing. Former College had such small classes, and was so gung-ho on seminars and student-centered learning and yada yada yada that it felt positively wrong to lecture (though I did, on occasion, and I know my colleagues did too). So teaching was almost always of the instant-feedback variety - that is, you knew instantly if the students had done the work or not, based on how they responded, and you got a sense of how well they'd understood it, and so on. I'd really forgotten how lecturing, and larger class sizes, distance you from that kind of feedback.

I'd forgotten, in fact, that that distance was why I didn't like lecturing. I have a variety of pedagogical reasons why I don't like lecturing and don't think it works as well as discussion-based teaching, but really, my problems with lecturing aren't based in abstract pedagogical principles so much as in the fact that primarily lecturing just feels wrong. My second "own" course was a class of 70, which pretty much required lecturing, and I remember thinking one day that every time I walked out of a class in which mine had been pretty much the only voice talking - which was pretty much every day - I felt like I'd failed somehow. Again, not because I had high moral objections to lecturing - just because it felt like putting messages in a bottle, tossing them into the ocean, and crossing my fingers.

I'd kind of forgotten that this is how I feel about lecturing. But now I'm lecturing more than I have done for a while (again, partly due to the need for variety), and I'm feeling like a bad teacher again. Thing is, I don't actually think I'm a bad lecturer, and I don't think that lecturing has to be in and of itself bad. What I need to do, I think, is work harder on incorporating interactive elements into my lectures, as a way to bridge the distance that the format creates.

Which gives me something concrete to think about for next term.

(This was intended as the post on lecture/discussion that I referenced earlier, but I'm not sure it ended up quite where I'd planned.)

Comments

[historyprof]

When you "lecture" are you using Powerpoint? Do you have any visuals? Do you ask questions and review frequently? Do you open up a question periodically for a short discussion? Or are you just talking? Just curious.

[nik]

What is this lecture you speak of? I've been sheltered in the ways of undergraduate seminars, graduate seminars, and small workshop classes. I think that "to lecture" means that you write a mini-paper and present it to the class? Or you take pages of notes and riff off/read them to the class? You can use these from semester to semester?
Fascinating.

[Dr. Moonbeam]

To answer nik, when I lecture I speak from fairly detailed outlines. So I'm not writing mini-papers and simply reading them (ack), but I have a lot of information at my fingertips, because frankly I don't have a great memory for names and dates and other details. And yes, I use them from semester to semester, although I do update regularly.

I actually rather like lecturing. Once the lectures have been written once, they're less stress than running a discussion, for me. Generally my survey classes are large and so those are mostly lecture; upper-div tend to be about half and half. I think I deliver a pretty good lecture, in terms of vocal animation, including maps and other visuals, and so on. Probably that's why I like them, because I think I do a decent job!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

historyprof - yes, I usually have Powerpoints with my lectures so that I can include visuals (and dates and names, where relevant, so students can get them easily). I do ask questions and I do try to "signpost" fairly regularly (e.g. "There are three main factors that we need to remember about X. The first factor blah blah blah, the second factor, blah blah blah, so we've seen factor one and factor two, now factor three is blah blah blah, okay, so the important thing is to remember factors one, two, and three"), although it's usually me doing it rather than the students, and sometimes I do open up for discussion with a short question. But I need consciously to do all of these things more systematically.

Writing this comment, I realize there are two things going on: first, I tend to think of lecture and discussion as two separate entities, and so some of the things that I can do to make lecture more interactive, I may not do, because I figure in the next hour we're going to do the interactive discuss-y stuff anyway. Which isn't really a reason not to do that stuff in lecture, but is how I've been thinking about it. So I need to work on being able to mix the two more. When I think of them separately, it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy - if I expect us to discuss in the next hour, I may not ask a lot of questions in the lecture time, and the less I ask questions, the more students expect lecture to be about me talking, so that then when I *do* actually ask questions, they don't actually think I want them to talk. (Can't blame them for that.)

And second, my default assumption really does seem to be that lecture is something you do when running discussion isn't feasible. (Probably because I really only experienced systematic lecture in really big classes where usual discussion techniques don't work.) That's not actually why I lecture - I'll lecture for a change of pace, to get across material that isn't available in a tidy reading assignment, to give background, to highlight some stuff quickly that it would take too long to bring about through discussion, or even just to tell a cool story - but somewhere in my head, my conviction that lecturing is inferior to discussion-based teaching leads me to think of it as something that you do only when you *can't* run discussion. And since lecture is about not being able to run discussion, I don't always think to bring in some of the discussion elements (because lecturing de facto means it's not possible) (I mean, it doesn't, but that's how it works in my head).

It is interesting, though - I'm not actually in this situation at the moment, but the possibilities for an interactive lecture do seem very different with a group of 30 vs. a group of 100. Something like opening a question up for discussion during lecture is a great way to make lecture more interactive, but does it work very effectively when you have 100+ students in a room? I didn't find that that particular technique worked very well for me when I used to lecture to large classes, but others may have had other experiences. (I think there are other ways to make big lectures more interactive, just haven't had success with that one.)

nik - the form my lectures take varies a lot depending on the subject and how well I know it. I have a "structure of the medieval church" lecture that I deliver in basically ALL of my classes, and it doesn't change very much (because it's not material really up for a lot of revision - it's pretty much factual - but I give it repeatedly because it's stuff my students don't usually know and it's not usually stated explicitly in the readings I assign). I can do that sucker in my sleep now. So lectures like that, I don't use notes - otherwise, I'm like Dr. M, I use outlines (though mine are far messier than hers!). And like her I update from semester to semester, although it's more so that the material I may have put together originally for course A in which we read books B, C, & D, actually makes sense for course M, in which we read books X, Y, & Z, than to ensure I'm taking into account new scholarship (I do worry about giving the same lectures years from now, but I also figure, that's what the readings I assign are for - I try to assign new-ish stuff as course books, to update the content, and that's how I incorporate it into my own knowledge/lectures).

[Dr. Moonbeam]

I want you to come give your medieval church lecture to my classes, NK! The two that I can pretty much do in my sleep (although I'd want to have my PowerPoints) are the one on feudalism vs. manorialism, and the one on the Black Death. *g*

[Belle]

I've been waiting for this post! I'm currently experimenting with my dreaded survey - after trying the 'standard'methods of lecture, lecture/discussion, lecture/discussion/student presentations, all student presentations... I'm going to try something different again in the spring. So your insights on both method and the way your mind frames them is interesting and helpful. As to discussion in large groups, have you considered pair/threesome work? Toss out a couple of questions and have small student groups work on an answer. Then get them to shout out the answers they came up with and compare - leading to discussion of options, interpretations, etc..

[Academic vixen]

I've been very lucky that I have always taught to smaller classes (largest I have here is 20) but in grad school I TA'd for the alrge 500 lecture course and I learned alot from that prof who was also an actor. He made that class feel very interactive and discussion oriented. The two main things he did was walk up and down the aisles of the stadium style classroom which broke that feeling that the prof is the little spot down at front and people in the top and back are just invisible theatre audiences. He would also ask questions and pass the mike down the rows so people could respond. He only did that a handful of times each class but it made all the difference. He also did the discuss with the people around you for a few minutes.

[Aven]

Your post (thank you, as always, for such thoughtful discussions) made me think about why I'm comfortable with certain types of classes/teaching styles and not with others. I think it boils down, very simply, to what I experienced myself as an undergrad. I mainly had either large (70-200 students) lecture classes, with little to no discussion, or very small (generally 3-15 students) language classes, which had discussion, but revolved mainly around exercises and translation. The only mid-range, discussion oriented classes I had were in English lit, and I didn't have many.

What this means for me now is that I'm comfortable lecturing (with attempts at fostering discussion, though I'm not very good at it) or leading language classes, and I'm moderately comfortable with discussion-based *literature* classes (also, of course, because that's my area) -- though I have lots of work to do on fostering discussion and working out good assignments for them. But I'm really struggling this year, because I'm teaching two smaller (~15 students) history classes. I am conflicted about how much to lecture, how else to run the class, how much to go over what's in the readings, how much additional information to give, how much to focus on interpretation rather than facts -- and what 'interpretation' means in a history class. I'm really not a historian, but in Classics one is expected to be able to teach everything, so I have to figure it out. I've been getting good ideas from some of your past posts and comments, and I'm looking for more, because I really don't feel like I know what I'm doing.

Sorry for the long comment -- I guess I'm not feeling great about my teaching this year, either, so your post resonated with me! And I don't know that I'm doing a bad job -- I just don't know if I'm doing a good one.

[saxifraga]

Thanks for an interesting post. I am most used to the lecture format or the lecture and seaparate discussion/seminar hours formats and think I do a decent job at the lecturing itself. But, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one struggling with the balance between discussion and lecture and lecture-based classes.

As you, I'm trying to incorporate discussion into the lecture rather than leaving it all for the separate discussion hours, but often meet a wall of blank faces because students are not really expecting to be ready to participate at a moments notice when they have their mind set on being audience.

I think it's difficult to pick out the good discussion starters in the lecture topic if it isn't structured with discussion in mind. Some times I put a question or a question mark on a powerpoint slide in the middle of the lecture to indicate that here is something we should stop and discuss, but that doesn't always work. Sometimes I try to emphasise problems with a method or an idea to get students going, but last time this just ended with someone accusing me for taking sides. Sometimes it works beautifully and students ask questions as we go along and initiate the discussions themselves, but I am not sure how to make this happen. I think it is very interesting to hear how others are handling these issues.