In Defense of Continuous Exposition by the Teacher

The New York Times published an essay this weekend by education writer Annie Murphy Paul titled “Are College Lectures Unfair?” In the essay, Paul uses a number of research studies to make the argument that active learning instruction, while beneficial to all students, is particularly effective at improving learning outcomes for traditionally underrepresented student groups, including students of color, low-income students, first-generation students, and women in STEM fields. Consequentially, compared to active learning instruction, the traditional college lecture seems to privilege “white males from more affluent, educated families.”

Given a provocatively titled, yet research-based essay in a major publication arguing against the traditional lecture, I predict a flurry of blog posts and opinion columns in the next couple of weeks, most of them titled “In Defense of the Lecture.” If history is any indication, many of them will read like Alex Small’s 2014 Chronicle of Higher Education piece, indeed titled “In Defense of the Lecture.” It’s a thoughtful essay, written by someone who seems to be an intentional and effective teacher. It’s just titled incorrectly.

I joked on Twitter yesterday that I’ve never seen an essay titled “In Defense of Continuous Exposition by the Teacher.” But that’s how I read titles like “In Defense of the Lecture.” Why? Because these pieces are usually written in opposition to a research-based essay like Annie Murphy Paul’s. And the research comparing lectures and active learning, at least the research that I cite frequently, has a fairly specific definition of “lecture.”

Donald Bligh, in his 2000 book What’s the Use of Lectures?, describes the lecture as “more or less continuous expositions by a speaker who wants the audience to learn something.” Bligh goes on to summarize the research literature: Lectures are as good as other methods at transmitting information, but lectures are generally not effective at promoting thought, changing attitudes, inspiring interest, or teaching skills.

In their 2014 meta-analysis of 228 studies comparing lectures to active learning instruction in STEM contexts, Scott Freeman and colleagues use Bligh’s language, defining traditional lecturing as “continuous exposition by the teacher.” Their meta-analysis showed that active learning instruction led to lower failure rates and greater student learning (as measured by exam grades) than traditional lecturing.

While we’re at it, here’s the consensus definition of active learning that Freeman et al. used:

“Active learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening to an expert. It emphasizes higher-order thinking and often involves group work.”

The research seems pretty clear to me. Lecturing, as defined as “continuous exposition by the teacher,” is, in general, on average, less effective at promoting student learning than active learning instruction.

Alex Small’s Chronicle essay may be titled “In Defense of the Lecture,” but it’s not a defense of the lecture at all… if you define lecture as “continuous exposition by the teacher.” According to his essay, Small regularly includes questions and discussion with students alongside the modeling of expert thinking that he provides from the front of the room. That sounds like active learning to me — surfacing and activating student prior knowledge, providing students opportunities to practice their thinking and receive feedback on that practice.

One of Alex Small’s comments, written in the discussion section accompanying the essay, jumped out at me this afternoon:

“Half my detractors are saying I’m not lecturing and half are saying I need to stop lecturing. Can we get a consensus one way or the other?”

That’s the problem, isn’t it? The research is clear that “continuous exposition by the teacher” is less effective than active learning, but when many college instructors hear the word “lecture,” they don’t think “continuous exposition by the teacher.” They think of the kinds of “lectures” that Alex Small describes, ones in which students are regularly engaged in, well, active learning. (Thanks to Jo VanEvery, via Twitter, for this point.)

Let’s be clear: According to the research, if your understanding of “lecture” involves engaging students in discussion and interaction during class, then you should keep lecturing. It’s “continuous exposition by the teacher” that’s the problem. My only advice would be to consider whether all of your students are learning actively, or just some. It’s easy to engage a few, harder to engage all. See my recent post on Think-Pair-Share for some ideas for helping all of your students learn actively during class.

Back on Twitter, Eric Detweiler pointed out something critical. Detweiler wrote, about essays defending or critiquing the lecture, “What is framed as central to the course, or a ‘break’ from it, is fascinating.” Alex Small appears to see himself as someone who lectures, with a variety of student interactions mixed in. Me, I see myself as someone who practices active learning instruction, with the occasional “times for telling” (Schwartz & Bransford, 1998). Yes, I lecture, too. Just not continuously. A well-timed explanation can be very effective at promoting student learning, and, as Alex Small points out, students need to see expert thinking modeled from time to time.

It’s quite possible for two people with remarkably similar teaching methods to talk right past each other.

I should add that some lecture defenses argue that “continuous exposition by the teacher” is a straw man, that no one really teaches that way. I wish that were true. I’ve sat in the back of enough classrooms to know that, yes, there are instructors for whom “lecture” does mean “continuous exposition by the teacher.” Articles and books like Bligh’s and Freeman’s and Paul’s are thus important, because it needs to be clear that the nothing-but-lecture approach is not supported by the research.

But for those of us who have more nuanced understandings of a college lecture, let’s see if we can get past this miscommunication. If you read a critique of lecturing, see if the author’s definition of lecturing matches your own. When I read a defense of lecturing, I’ll do the same. I’m sure I’ll continue to use “traditional lecturing” as a shorthand for something more specific, but I’ll make an effort to clarify what I mean whenever I can.

And, please, let this be the only blog post I see titled “In Defense of Continuous Exposition by the Teacher.”

22 Responses to "In Defense of Continuous Exposition by the Teacher"

Steve Ehrmann says:

September 15, 2015 at 10:59 am

I agree strongly with your point that continuous exposition is comparatively weak, especially for the students who need the most help in learning. But let’s assume that the class has more than 20 students, perhaps even 200.
* When faculty ask questions and wait a couple seconds for a hand from the audience, they engage only a small fraction of the students, the rest remain in passive mode, waiting to hear the right answer from someone.
* I contrast that with a strategy that provides strong encouragement for all students to answer and even converse (rather than launching a one-liner and leaving it at that). Eric Mazur is one vivid exemplar of how to engage most students in a large lecture hall for at least a few minutes at a time.

One additional observation: personally, the best lecturers are, for me, also the worst. Their ideas are so powerful and provocative that I can’t listen more than a few minutes before beginning to think about something they’ve said. Because it’s important, I might spend several minutes thinking about it, and then surface and realize I’ve lost the thread of the lecture. So the next few minutes are lost too while I try to reintegrate. Once I’m back in, in only a few minutes I may soar away again, thinking about the next thing.

I’m gradually becoming a bigger fan of moving most exposition online where it can be chunked or, at the very least, paused or repeated. Our short term memories get erased too easily when they’re being dosed with a steady flow of new, useful information. Faculty are most aware of that when they have to sit through orientations for new faculty, which are often just this kind of steady dumping of potentially useful information. Faculty are expert learners, but how much do they remember after a few hours of mini-lectures, one right after another?

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1. Derek Bruff says:
  
  September 15, 2015 at 12:44 pm
  
  Thanks for the comment, Steve. When writing this post, I was aware that I was walking a thin line. It’s pretty easy to convince yourself that your “interactive” lecture engages more students than it actually it is. That’s why I added, in my second draft, the line above started “My only advice…” that mentions Think-Pair-Share.
  
  In most of my teaching workshops, I bring up the idea of “all skate” activities, ones where every student is invited and encouraged to be actively involved–like “all skate” times at the roller rink. Such activities are, in my mind, a more powerful form of active learning instruction than the less formal Q&A periods that can be built into a lecture.
  
  Reply
Siva Vaidhyanathan says:

September 15, 2015 at 5:15 pm

Yeah. I am in the “that’s a straw man” camp.

Courses with continuous exposition (which is exhausting and obviously boring but sometimes necessary) usually have other features like discussion sections, labs, and response writing. Every university probably has one professor who drones on without a lab of some sort. But there are all sorts of bad teaching practices going on and many bad teachers.

What bugs me about this “debate,” which, you point out, is mostly people talking past each other, is that it denies that students “act” even when listening to a lecture. They dismiss. They take issue. They agree. They make connections. Students are adults who deserve the chance and often welcome the opportunity to listen to experts hold forth on a subject.

The overwhelming feedback I have had over nearly 20 years of university teaching is that my students much prefer my lectures than any other techniques I have tried (and I have tried them all and STILL continue to experiment). They took my class to listen to me, they say. “Active learning” seems to them cheating, like I am making them do my work for me.

Now that’s not a fair characterization either. But it’s important to get to the core of their concerns and take it seriously.

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1. Derek Bruff says:
  
  September 16, 2015 at 10:55 am
  
  Thanks for the comment, Siva. You make a very important point that the fifty minutes (or more) students spend in a class session is just a part of the entire learning experience in a course. It’s the part that we instructors are most aware of, but it’s important to consider the entire experience when planning instruction. That’s one of the reasons I find the flipped classroom idea useful–it helps faculty think about and plan that whole experience more intentionally.
  
  You also raise a point I hear often in these conversations, that students attending a lecture aren’t listening passively, they’re listening actively. It’s true that all learning is active, in a sense, but I still think there’s value in identifying certain teaching methods as “active learning instruction.” Why? When one lectures, one can hope or expect that students are engaged in active listening, but it’s quite possible that many students aren’t, that they’re just scribing in a more passive manner. Active learning instruction, by contrast, involves directing students to activities in which they interact with the content, with each other, with the instructor in specific ways.
  
  If I’m advising, say, a junior faculty member on the design of a lesson, I’ll recommend active learning instruction because it provides students more structure and guidance for learning and because it’s easier for the instructor to see evidence of their learning. Yes, it’s possible that a lecture can help students surface prior knowledge and practice critical thinking, but, in most situations, I have more confidence that active learning instruction will do so.
  
  That said, I also think it’s important to help instructors identify teaching strategies that are relevant to their particular teaching goals and contexts. Studies show that, on average, “continuous exposition by the teacher” is less effective than “active learning instruction,” but it’s likely that in particular situations, lecture/exposition is very effective at promoting student learning. Given the student feedback you’ve received, Siva, you may well be in one of those situations. And certainly within an entire course, there will likely be times when a lecture is the most effective strategy a teacher can use.
  
  By the way, I made a short video on the role of lectures (that is, teacher exposition) for the STEM teaching MOOC that I co-teach. That video is now on YouTube, and you might find it interesting.
  
  Reply
2. Ian August says:
  
  October 18, 2015 at 8:40 am
  
  Hi Siva,
  My experience is that students are asking for lecture, not because they learn best that way, but because it is easier for them, and comfortable, while active learning takes more effort, but they get a bigger reward. I think most classes are passive learning, listening to exposition. So by the time the students graduate high school and experience a small amount of college courses that use active learning, the student has a hard time breaking out of the mold of passive learning.
  
  One teacher I had in grad school, who is huge proponent of active learning (she teachers online), is reporting that every year she gets more and more pushback from her students when she asks them to become passive learners. The students are complaining that they just want to read and write essays like they do for the rest of their courses. I find this very fascinating. What are your thoughts on why the students are pushing? My thoughts were, as I said above, if all the student knows is passive learning, its hard for them to become active learners.
  
  Reply
3. Mark Sample says:
  
  October 18, 2015 at 9:30 am
  
  One of the problems with lectures—and especially in the extreme form of “continuous exposition by the teacher”—is that we don’t know what’s going on in students’ heads during the exposition. So, yes, there’s an opportunity for students to, as Siva puts it, dismiss, take issue, agree, and make connections, but we don’t know if that’s what’s going on.
  
  We’re teaching blind, in a sense. And teaching blind is as reckless as driving in the dark without headlights on. We often equate “active learning” with activity on the student’s part, but the important flip side is that the teacher must be an active participant too, evaluating whether in fact students are actually learning what we expect them to be. Not only does lecturing promote passive learning on the students’ part; it promotes passive teaching too. In a new NYT op-ed, the writer suggests that because she “hot and sweaty” after giving a vigorous lecture, she has somehow been an active teacher. She conflates her effort performing with her students’ efforts engaging with the material. It’s a tragic mistake, and it underscores exactly how much lecturing makes the professor’s ego the center of the class.
  
  Reply
  1. Edward R. O'Neill says:
    
    October 18, 2015 at 11:13 am
    
    Mark, you seem to be thinking of lecturing as a monologue. We only don’t know what’s going on in the students’ heads *if we don’t ask*.
    
    Some lectures are indeed monologues. But many expert lecturers ask questions and discuss *during* the lecture. (Here the research term-of-art ‘continuous exposition’ seems quite inaccurate.)
    
    Lumping all lecturing together into one catch-all has the further problem of not distinguishing what’s happening in the lecture, what the form of the content is. If you are reciting a series of facts the students need to know, their mental activity is probably just verifying that they have seen these facts before, and the engagement is likely low.
    
    But if the lecture consists of a series of questions or a series of challenging problems, what’s happening in the students’ heads is quite different.
    
    To me, this again points to the problem of thinking all lecturing is one kind of thing. It may be convenient for research, but it doesn’t capture very much of the reality of the educational experience.
    
    Reply
    1. Tom says:
      
      October 23, 2015 at 1:31 pm
      
      A chunk of the problem may be that “lecture” doesn’t actually mean anything specific. It’s a bit like sandwich or shoe (or MOOC). You get a general idea that something’s between bread, something’s on your foot, someone will be speaking for some duration but beyond that . . . things get much more complicated.
      
      Is a hotdog a sandwich? Is a slipper a shoe? Is a Socratic seminar a lecture?
      
      It’ll depend on who you ask and their pro/con position is pretty specific to their own, frequently unspoken, definition of lecture.
      
      Then there’s the further continuum of skill in all of this. By whatever definition, I don’t think we’re going to have many “great” lecturers. So what about poor lecturing vs worse attempts at active learning.
      
      I’m also fairly fascinated by when people care what students “like” vs when they do what’s “good” for them students no matter their opinion. That position flips at some odd times.
      
      So probably no point to this other than to say I enjoyed your post.
      
      Reply
Edward R. O'Neill, Ph.D. says:

September 16, 2015 at 10:50 am

I appreciate this nuanced response to (and subsequent discussion of) a highly oversimplified debate.

Overall, I think we could give some credence to what expert practitioners tell us, and we could avoid acting is if the research we have simply tells us “do this” without qualifications.

First, great lecturers do something terrific. It maybe more important in electives or in introductory courses. But it’s important, and students do enjoy it, and it motivates and engages, and we shouldn’t throw that away with some kind of blanket injunction for so-called ‘active learning.’

Good lecturing is active. It engages the audience. It’s a live event in which the actual character of the person speaking seems to matter. Yale professor Donald Kagan is very eloquent about this in his Teach Better podcast interview.

Second, if we are to be evidence-based, that does not mean: we find a meta-analysis and tell everyone “do this.” In medicine, evidence-based practice includes the notion of adapting the treatment to the population at hand. If your patient is never going to make a lifestyle change, then yes, a prescription might be a better choice.

Just because we have studies on active learning does not mean lecture/section classes will magically go away. Nor will active learning fit all institutions. We should be more nuanced about this–and that is still being evidence-based.

Third, we could be a bit more critical of what educational research is and does, at least in this area.

Lecturing is “continuous exposition”? Is there a more reductive, boring way to imagine the lecture? What a failure of imagination on the part of researchers! And a failure to observe what really happens in a lecture.

Sometimes it seems like no one who researches the lecture has ever (a) seen or heard a good lecture, or (b) thought of trying to distinguish between better and worse lecturing. (To preview a bit, it must also be said: there’s research on teaching which is not just a comparison of Method A and Method B.)

I agree with the comments on this page hoping for more nuance about lecturing. When studies compare lecturing ‘on average,’ what does this mean? How do they know the ‘continuous exposition’ is all the same? Are there great and terrible lectures–and little in between? Is that where the average comes from? Or is there a great boring middle, with some true awfulness at the bottom, and a tiny bit of greatness.

I’ve never seen anything to tell us. But I believe really ought to know.

In fact: I think we do know a lot about when lecturing works–it’s just not published under the topic “lecturing.” It’s published under the idea of teaching.

Instructor clarity, ego-supportive communication, person-centered teaching, instructor immediacy: all these things happen in quote-unquote lectures, as much as in other classroom formats, and they drive positive student attitudes and also learning.

When Yale professor Craig Wright teaches music appreciation, he memorizes the faces and names of students, remembers where they are from, and then says things like ‘Eleanor, you’re from Nashville, have you ever been to the Grand Ol’ Opry? This harmonic progression is very much like what you find in country music.’ That’s knowing the student and her prior knowledge, using a concrete example, etc., etc.

Whence the weird notion that lecturing is never active? Has no active components? Or is not engaging?

If you think lectures aren’t active and don’t engage–you’re doing it wrong.

Lecturing has become our straw man of choice. We’re not shooting the messenger, we’re shooting the mode of delivery.

Didn’t we get past thinking that online would never be as good as face-to-face instruction, and then start looking at online was good for? Can we not do the same for the lecture?

Reply
Why Lecture Matters: A View from the Trenches | The Winds of War says:

October 18, 2015 at 7:31 am

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Active Learning Is Not Our Enemy: A Response to Molly Worthen | A Lifetime's Training says:

October 20, 2015 at 2:06 pm

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November 3, 2015 at 4:02 pm

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July 21, 2016 at 9:09 am

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December 6, 2017 at 4:56 pm

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How to Teach a Cyborg - The Laptop Review says:

December 9, 2017 at 12:13 pm

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January 16, 2018 at 2:59 pm

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Lecture-Based Pedagogy and the Pitfalls of Expertise says:

March 13, 2018 at 12:50 pm

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February 13, 2021 at 1:29 pm

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A Philosophy of Faculty Development – Agile Learning says:

October 7, 2022 at 7:11 am

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January 30, 2023 at 2:24 pm

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