Lectures are definitely important with transferring information to students, but hands-on research is also important to allow students to remember and see how the information learned in class applies to the world. This program at Lehigh University seems to do a great job of stepping beyond the classroom to allow students to explore topics they are curious about. http://bit.ly/1o3TGXH

I believe that lecture is often more effective for middle school students who are not yet making the connection between active engagement in project based learning and written standardized testing. We as teachers have to help students extrapolate the knowledge available in hands on learning and model the connections to written tests often in order to provide a scaffold until the students are experienced enough to do this for themselves. I know this, even with power point my middle school students struggle to take notes- and I would hate to be a college professor in a few years because I think this is becoming the norm.

I love lectures and great arguments but the last class I took everyone was on FB or taking selfies for Twitter.

What were you teaching, intolerance?

Krystal Wilson • 7 days ago
I don't mind gays. BUt illegals...they need to go.

Discussion on Infowars

Cruz: Blame Obama for immigration surge

Krystal Wilson • 7 days ago
I like immigrants for cheap labor.

Great article and the excellent comments underneath! However, the article misses to
address the possibility of cultural differences. E.g., when article
cites the German research, it fails to acknowledge that the US culture
is pronouncedly individualistic, whereas other societies are more
collective. For more information pls consider:
Ernst, C. T. (2004). Richard E. Nisbett. The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently ... and Why. Personnel Psychology, (2), 504.

The article generalizes: another omission is the subject-oriented
character of the learning process: there are subjects, where lecture
might be more prevalent and there are some where project learning, peer
instruction and project-based learning might be more applicable.
I opened the article for discussion on our IMS blog:
http://blog.stcloudstate.ed...
and hope to see feedback from the faculty on our campus.

"But what’s changed is that the lecture is no longer the only way to transfer important information."

The lecture never was the only way to communicate information. It was never the best way, either.

The article betrays a lack of historical awareness. It seems the author never bothered to ask why teachers began lecturing in the first place.

Before the lecture, we had the written word. Thanks to scrolls and books, you could find information without having to ask a living person. That's a fabulous technology, and it still works.

But books were rare and expensive. Rather than force scores of poor students to purchase books they couldn't afford, schools began to do lectures, sharing the text with several people at the same time, for free. Sometimes these lectures involved nothing more than a man reading the book out loud to an audience.

Today, text is cheap and easily available. The problem that lectures addressed has largely been solved. Therefore, the lecture is no longer needed.

I am seeing more and more parallels between the current evolution of education and the 1990's evolution of software engineering. Software engineering, at that time, was seeing the raise of computer aided software engineering and a quest for a single best process and best tool that would lead to successful software development projects.

Two of the most important lessons learned during this time were that there is a better way, and that the magic bullet is that there is no magic bullet. This concept is part of one of the landmark documents in modern software engineering, the agile manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

So rather then deciding if the lecture is good or bad, which is focusing on the process, I would look for hallmarks of when it is appropriate, and when it adds value to a specific set of students studying a specific subject. Sometimes a lecture will be appropriate, sometimes a workshop or lab, and sometimes a group discussion, and sometimes something totally different.

Thank you for that wise statement. After reading so many comments of "lecturing is obsolete" and that it "doesn't work", all I can think of is that it works for *me* as a learner. If it works for me, then it works for others (no matter how individualistically I may think of myself). I hate project-based learning and groups as a learner, myself, because I always end up holding up others. I write well, and have learned to take good notes, have an organization system in place, and I learn best by listening. I need a few hours to process and come up with good questions to clarify things and figure out applications. But then I've got it.

If we want to talk about serving all students and differentiation, we need to include as many types of instruction as we can - not eliminating one because at the moment it is currently unpopular. I think there are more students like me than we know, because they are the ones who are quietly taking notes and not the ones who make a production out of being bored because they never practiced the skill of concentration (too much pbl and collaborative learning where the note-taker does most of the work, if you ask me). But I'm not bitter or anything ;-)

All I'm saying is that it is a tool to be used within a tool box. We don't throw away the manual screwdriver because we have a power drill. There are times when the manual works easiest and best. The same goes for lecture.

Our typical "change everything" attitude in education. Using a variety of methods to engage different students with different learning styles and abilities works best. Too much of any method is probably not good. However, as is mentioned below, there are some BRILLIANT lecturers and they should not quit just because there is a smart board around. Almost 50 years later, I can still remember some of these brilliant teachers, AND what they said.

The question for an educator shouldn't be whether or not to move away from the lecture. The question should be "Why?" Several research studies (and, no doubt, your own experience) indicate that students are becoming increasingly bored in class and unable to learn as effectively as recent as 10 years ago (before mobile technology). Why? As you're well aware, we live in an entertainment society, where competition for a student's attention is fierce. (They're on SnapChat, Vine, Facebook, & Twitter... in class.) Simply put, engaged students learn effectively. (Of course, you know this. I'm not saying anything new. The recent Stanford article mentioned in these comments is the latest proof.)

So, if you're an educator who excels at engaging your students via the lecture, then by all means, keep lecturing. After all, engagement is the key. However, if you're an educator who loathes the fact that your job is requiring you to become an entertainer more than a teacher (as many educators have told me), then you should probably explore moving away from the lecture. Better yet, create a hybrid lecture format, introducing technology & new teaching methods to stimulate class engagement. You don't necessarily have to give up the lecture if that's what you're most comfortable with. Just start testing. Find what new teaching method or technology works best with your personality and for your students.

I love that the philosophy professor defends 'sage on stage' lecturing. WWSD? (What Would Socrates Do?)

Some subjects, particularly the more abstract, are better presented in lecture format. Philosophy is definitely that kind of subject although a good Q&A-discussion phase can be useful for involved topics.

"Some subjects, particularly the more abstract, are better presented in lecture format." --> Do we have evidence to that effect?

In all honesty, if all the experts crunching all the figures have it so figured out, why is our education system still falling behind? One reason, many have never been in a classroom and their data is based mostly on theory and not practical applications. Common Core should be interesting to watch...

"... if all the experts ... have it so figured out, why is our education system still falling behind?" Could it be because of policies that have little to do with education techniques or strategies in the classroom? For example, could it be because of gross underfunding of public schools, the shift from public to private (for profit) schools, and systematic policies that gear the class room to the least able of the students (Common Core and No Child Left Behind)?

Lecture has a place in education. We should listen to educators at certain junctures in the educational process. Educators expressing information on a particular topic is totally appropriate in face to face class meetings. Just because we can learn through technological avenues does not eliminate the need for lecture. I say this even though I am a strong proponent of personal learning through inquiry.

Lectures (i.e. educator presenting information via spoken instruction) shouldn't be to blame for the disengagement crisis.
I'd argue that the "conventional lecture dynamic" is more at fault-- i.e. the tradition of one educator presenting the same set of information, at the same speed, in the same fashion, to 30+ students at one time.
Interesting and relevant study- "The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring" by Benjamin S. Bloom.

I'm also surprised, 99% of the time this blog has excellent information. But the article ignores a vast amount of research in cognitive psychology on learning on why expert teachers are moving away from lectures. The story makes the movement away form lectures to be a fad or a trend and not based research and data on learning. BTW, there is a time and place for lecture but not for the process of transfer.

Regarding that study about the effect of lecture on students' algebra test scores carried out by Guido Schwerdt, make sure you click the link and read the study. Schwerdt found that increased lecturing led to increases of only around 5% of a standard deviation in student test scores, and results for high- and low-achieving students were not statistically significant. Also, the "test" in question only measured factual knowledge, not problem-solving skills. (Schwerdt is up-front with these facts.) So even the evidence in lecture's favor isn't extremely compelling, at least IMO.

This is a topic that the news media is still beginning to grasp that it's no longer a fringe idea. They're only now beginning to accept, to perceive the extent of this educational paradigm morphing. Last week, a study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education proclaimed the advantages of "hands-on" approached to instruction, of the efficacy of the "flipped classroom". It happens that this study focused on comparison of techniques for teaching neuroscience. The findings were featured in the April-June issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.

I caught that Stanford article when it first came out, and it's really interesting. It's not really so much hands on vs. flipped classroom, but rather it seems to promote a way of doing the flipped classroom that makes flipping even more effective (namely, have students do hands-on activities prior to watching lectures). It's worth a look.

I have training in the flipped classroom. I love the depth it allows but transition to this is slow. Often results are not as high as anticipated due to a lack of personal responsibility by a large majority of parents and students to whom the concept is new. We have to get away from spoon feeding everything and into a mindset of more active participant in our own education.

Just read the Stanford article. I would like to see this accomplished with a completely different hands-on model. It may just happen that the "BrainExplorer" interactive device is so good that it makes the study work. Until they repeat with a different hands-on model, you cannot be sure.

I'm going to have to look at this Stanford article. The flipped classroom is really just a way to force efficiency, in my mind. That is, the workflow is the same (watch the lecture and then do the problems) just shifted in terms of when the material is presented and practiced. The efficiency comes in that there is less 'spinning of the wheels' while doing the problems because you have an expert there (the instructor) and some study pals (your classmates). Plus, students seem to enjoy short, directed lessons that they can watch in their own time (and repeatedly), which I have seen increases the number of students who actually utilize the lecture material. So, there is promise here, especially in problem based classes (math and science).