For the past several months I have been reevaluating my teaching methodology and specifically whether I should embrace or discard lecturing in my classes. Currently, all the courses that I teach are general education requirements with at least forty students in each class. As an undergraduate I remember attending lecture-oriented classes that were painful to sit through. Looking back, I am forced to ask myself whether it was my immaturity, poor study habits or the speaking ability of the professor that made me believe that such courses were boring and ineffective. Now the situation is reversed. I am the professor and a new batch of students are forced to take my classes.
I have heard the arguments for abandoning the lecture. Small groups are what works best, some say. Another argument is that professors must include multimedia in their presentations - movies, cartoon, video clips - anything but straight lecturing. Powerpoint presentations are also suggested to be outdated and cannot help the lecturer.
In a few of my initial classes, I scraped by with canned lectures and came to the conclusion that something must change. But I am not convinced that the lecture must be completely abandoned. One of my friends at Fordham University, who was voted teaching fellow of the year two years in a row, commented on how he incorporated stories into his lectures. He told me that he tries to include at least one personal story in each lecture. Since the beginning of the fall semester this year I have tried to mimic this strategy. The good Lord knows that I have plenty of funny, entertaining, heart-breaking and unbelievable stories to tell that are based on my life's experiences. For the most part, I have been having tremendous results. Of course some of my lectures are not good, especially the ones that fall outside of my discipline and I am forced to rely on other people's scholarship. But several students have commented on how much they enjoy the stories I tell and certainly when I do pause and tell an emotional or hilarious story, the sleepy eyes of many students brighten and, in some cases, you can hear a pin drop in the class as I tell a particular anecdote. My question then is this: are stories the way to revive the notoriously boring lecture? Must teachers abandon lecturing all together and have students constantly breaking up into small groups and doing activities in order to ensure good evaluation reports?
JY
