Todd Zakrajsek, Associate Professor in the School of Medicine and the Department of Family Medicine, Associate Director of Fellowship Programs, and teaching consultant in the Academy of Educators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was the Keynote Presenter at the Spring 2017 Teaching and Learning Symposium. His presentation “Moving the Focus in Higher Education from Teaching to Learning to Strategically Combine Lectures and Active Learning” is summarized below:
For too long we have focused on how faculty members teach when the real focus should be on how students learn. This moving from teaching to learning has been a consistent statement in higher education for over 20 years, yet our conversations still sound very teaching focused.
For example, there has recently been an attack against the “the lecture.” A meta-analysis of 225 studies pertaining to student learning by Freedman and associates in 2014 noted huge gains for students taught through active learning methodologies as compared to the traditional lecture. This has led several individuals, such as Erik Mazur (faculty member at Harvard), to indicate that it should be almost unethical to lecture, given the data on the relative gains attributed to more active learning approaches.
My primary concern is that I have heard very few people talk about different types of lectures. There are story-telling lectures, discussion-based lectures, Socratic lectures, just to name a few. Some lecture techniques, such as those used by Eric Mazur (Lecture Checks/Peer Instruction) can be very active. The point is this - any teaching strategy at any given moment may be effective, or not. It seems to me we would gain greatly by shifting the focus from how we are teaching (e.g., discussion lecture, jigsaw, team-based learning, flipped-classroom) to when students are learning (e.g., interested, engaged, and understanding content).
With this focus on student learning it may be noted that no teaching strategy will always be bad, or good. Lecturing may well be very appropriate, at the correct time and for the right length of time. Active learning in the form of groups may well be a fabulous teaching strategy, with appropriate instructions and methods in place. The real challenge is to maintain the interest, engagement, and proper level of understanding of our students. Long lectures lose students because learners in such circumstances will lose focus and become mentally fatigued (learning something challenging is exhausting). Lectures also have the disadvantage of not allowing for students to practice newly learned concepts or allowing us, as faculty, to know when we have lost students’ interest. For that reason, embedding activities after 10 - 15 minute mini-lectures have shown to greatly improve student outcomes. It isn’t that lectures, group work, flipped classrooms, or any other strategy is in isolation good or bad, it is that any strategy used too frequently will result in the learner losing attention and interest. Once interest and attention is lost, particularly when mental fatigue also comes into play, less learning will result.
It is time we seriously move the discussion from how we teach to how students learn. Research consistently shows that students learn best when provided with foundational information followed by being given the opportunity to do something with that information. So....how can we best make that happen?
For additional information on a number of different teaching strategies, on when using specific strategies might be useful, and on the research supporting their impact on student learning, motivation, and engagement, please check out the book that grounded the concepts presented at the Spring 2017 Teaching and Learning Symposium. The keynote presenter made arrangements for conference attendees to receive a discount on Teaching for Learning: 101 Intentionally Designed Education Activities to Put Students on the Path to Success—co-authors Todd Zakrajsek, Claire Major, and Michael Harris (Routledge, 2015). For the discount flyer, go to https://unl.box.com/s/ihy4aanfy9lyjnsamm5la3risjx25z2g,
If you would to talk about integrating active learning into your classroom, please contact your college’s instructional designer (go to http://teaching.unl.edu for a listing of instructional designers and the colleges they support).
To learn more about the integration of active learning activities into different types of lectures see the reflections and next steps from Chad E. Brassil, Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences; Clayton (Clay) Cressler, Assistant Professor, School of Biological Sciences workshop presentation at http://academicaffairs.unl.edu/events/teaching-learning-symposium-spring-2017.
For more information, contact Marie Barber at mbarber2@unl.edu