CHAPTER 1
Lecture versus Active Learning: Reframing the Debate

Educators today would be hard-pressed to identify a teaching technique more heartily maligned than the lecture. Lectures are boring: "Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep" (Albert Camus1). Lectures are ineffective: "A lecture is a process in which information passes from the notes of the lecturer into the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either" (Mark Twain2). Lectures are pointless: "Lectures were once useful; but now, when all can read and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary" (Samuel Johnson). Lecturing is currently considered to be so bad that one author imagines a future when universities are required to issue a warning to students that "lectures may stunt your academic performance and increase risk of failure" (Dawson, 2016). The list of criticisms continues and includes charges such as old-fashioned, overused, obsolete, and even unfair (see, for example, Abrams, 2012; Jensen & Davidson, 1997; Lambert, 2012; Paul, 2015; Segesten, 2012; Wieman, 2014).

Most of us have experienced listening to a lecture in which the speaker droned on and on; our minds wandered, our bodies fidgeted, and we would have dashed for the door had that been an option. One student expressed a similar sentiment: "I was so bored, I feared all the blood had left my head and I would pass out in the aisle" (El-Shamy, 2004, p. 24). Despite the surfeit of disparagements, research indicates that most college and university faculty members still lecture.3 Lectures have remained popular for many reasons, including that they serve several important instructional purposes. Furthermore, lectures don't have to be dreary and mind-numbing. We-and students-have encountered situations in which we sat transfixed as we listened to a particularly captivating lecture. Indeed, a colleague recently shared that these kinds of lectures were the transformative events of his undergraduate education.

Although most college professors continue to lecture, researchers have also found that few today rely on the lecture entirely;4 instead, they use lecture in combination with a variety of other teaching techniques, such as small-group work, case studies, discussion, and problem-solving-strategies that fall under the banner of "active learning." Active learning is a pedagogical approach that puts into practice over a half-century of research that demonstrates that, to truly learn, we need to make new information our own by working it into our personal knowledge and experience. As attractive as active learning is conceptually, however, many college teachers struggle with promoting it in practice. For example, assigning students to group work is a popular active learning pedagogy, yet teachers know that it is not safe to assume that students who are talking to each other are learning and that it is equally risky to conclude that students are learning when they are listening to other students talking. Furthermore, although lectures can leave some students disengaged, active learning strategies can engender full-blown resistance. We once overhead a student passionately protest, "Today was awful! My teacher . . ." [with our curiosity piqued, we waited for her to complete her complaint so that we could hear what terrible thing the professor had done] "assigned us to group work!"

Thus lecturing and active learning strategies have potential pitfalls, and although neither method is perfect, neither is despicable. Yet currently there is a fierce debate that sometimes intimates otherwise. This either-or dispute sets educators against each other in ways that we propose are unproductive. In this book, we aim to move past the premise that instructors must choose one or the other approach and suggest instead that faculty members can combine lectures with active learning to create a vibrant instructional environment that capitalizes on the benefits while minimizing the constraints of each. Our approach, a form of interactive lecturing, helps professors navigate the process of integrating lectures and active learning into a seamless whole that promotes deep learning.

We begin in Part 1 of this book by establishing our conceptual framework, which is grounded in research evidence. In this chapter, we answer the following questions:

• What is a lecture, and what is it good for?
• What is active learning, and what purposes does it serve?
• What are the main points of contention in the lectures versus active learning debate?
• Why is this debate problematic? And how can we reframe the basic proposition?

The Lecture

The word lecture comes from the Latin word lectare, which translates roughly into "to read" aloud, whereas the term lecture means "that which is read." To ancient Greeks, a lecture was the primary method of transmitting knowledge and information (Brown & Atkins, 1988), and this understanding served as the foundation for later developments. About the sixth century CE, scholars traveled hundreds of miles to European monasteries to hear monks read a book aloud from a lectern; as the monk read, scholars copied down the book verbatim (Exley & Dennick, 2004). With the establishment of universities in the Middle Ages, lectures persisted. Lecturing continued to be a core pedagogy as European higher education expanded during the subsequent centuries, and these traditions were transplanted to the colonies. By the mid-nineteenth century, lecturing was firmly established as the primary method of instruction in the American college classroom (Garside, 1996). But what exactly is a lecture?

Definitions of the Lecture

Bligh (1999) suggests a working definition of a lecture as "a more or less continuous exposition by a speaker who wants the audience to learn something" (p. 4). The literature is replete with similar definitions, such as the following:

• A lecture is an educational talk to an audience, especially to students in a university or college (Oxford Dictionary, n.d.).
• Lecture is a method of teaching in which the instructor gives an oral presentation of facts or principles to learners, who are responsible for note-taking (Good & Merkel, 1959).
• [A lecture is when] a teacher is talking and students are listening (Singh, 2006).

These definitions rely on a view of the lecture as a method of transmitting information. This model of lecturing became the prevalent pedagogy because it provided an essential method for conveying and spreading knowledge, especially in the centuries before the printing press facilitated widespread publication of books.

Purposes of the Lecture

Lectures have remained popular because they serve several important purposes. We summarize those purposes in Exhibit 1.1.

Exhibit 1.1 The Purposes of Lecture

Teachers use lectures to . . .

• Present information otherwise unavailable to students
• Present a synthesis of information from across multiple sources
• Organize information into a logical structure
• Share important background and contextual information and ideas
• Highlight similarities and differences
• Clarify confusing concepts, principles, and ideas
• Help learners consolidate information
• Model higher-order thinking strategies and skills
• Convey enthusiasm for the content
• Communicate why content is worth learning

Active Learning

Despite the trend of describing it as modern, active learning-similar to the lecture-has a long history in education. In 1852, John Henry Newman proposed that true learning consists "not merely in the passive reception into the mind of a number of ideas" but rather "in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action upon and towards those new ideas . . . and making the objects of our knowledge subjectively our own" (from Idea of a University). Page (1990) traces the origins of active learning back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as found in the work of Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Dewey, Kilpatrick, and Piaget. She describes four common themes associated with active learning, including rejection of traditional teaching methods, belief in the cognitive learning paradigm, faith in the ability of the student, and belief in the importance of the relationship of school to society. Although active learning's roots run deep, the actual term active learning wasn't popularized until the late twentieth century with the publication of Bonwell and Eison's (1991) ASHE-ERIC Report titled Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. But what exactly is active learning?

Definitions of Active Learning

Whereas definitions for the lecture seem relatively focused and straightforward, descriptions of active learning are broad and imprecise:

• Anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing (Bonwell & Eison, 1991)
• A process whereby students engage in activities, such as reading, writing, discussion, or problem-solving, which promote analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content (University of Michigan, Center for Research on Learning...