Article written by Julia Christensen Hughes, Dean, College of Management and Economics. 

Students have been complaining about the lecture since at least the late 1800s. In How Scholars Trumped Teachers (1999), Larry Cuban cites an 1895 student newspaper editorial challenging Stanford University professors to improve the effectiveness of their teaching. The article complains about students not being “called upon daily to recite” and professors who prefer “to spend most of [their] time in lecturing.”

About this same time, noted educational philosopher John Dewey was advocating for a form of teaching that fully engaged the student – one in which learning is tailored to the needs of the individual and facilitated through efforts to resolve social problems. It was Dewey’s view that “education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

Fast-forward to 1976, when educational researchers Ference Marton and Roger Saljo coined the terms “deep learning” and “surface learning” to describe the different approaches they observed in their students. Students who are said to exhibit surface learning may stay up all night before an exam to read the textbook or someone else’s notes – perhaps for the first time – in an effort to absorb enough material into short-term memory to pass the course and move on. Deep learning, in contrast, involves being fully present in the learning process, working hard to understand and apply concepts, drawing connections between one class and another, and generating new insights.

Most interestingly, these same researchers discovered that rather than labelling an individual student as a “deep learner” or “surface learner,” the same student could be either one, depending upon the learning environment. Learning environments that have been found to promote deep learning are those that resemble the ideas of the Stanford student editors and John Dewey – those in which students have the opportunity to discuss, debate and apply ideas, and where learning activities and assessments additionally require the development of communication, teamwork and other important skills. Problem-based or enquiry learning, community-based projects and co-op work terms are examples of learning approaches that help foster the application of knowledge and skill development.

This is not to say that the lecture has no use. A well-conceived and artfully delivered lecture can be both informative and motivational, particularly if, like a TED Talk, it is time-limited and perhaps accompanied by powerful visuals. However, education must be much more than this. Like dialogue from a gripping movie, most of a clever lecture can soon be forgotten.

Read the full article in The Globe and Mail [1]