I went to a presentation today at which there was free food.
(I did not pay attention to the actual purpose of the lecture when I was signing up. Just the promise of free food.)
Anyhoo, the presentation was on making better PowerPoint presentations for your lectures and talks and presentations and whatnot. The gentleman was extraordinarily well-prepared and well-educated. All in all, it was an excellent presentation, attending to all the latest pedagogical research in its construction as well as in its content. (So, after telling us that the average attention span for lecture-based teaching is twenty minutes and that we should plan small activities to get our audience's attention every twenty minutes, he asked us to break into groups and discuss what he'd just said.)
He also seemed like a genuinely nice guy.
But even though they had bribed me with rather good deli food, I almost shouted at him about three times during the lecture. The third time, I had to knit something to keep myself from telling him that it was the most ludicrous thing I'd ever heard in my life.
Some of the things he suggested:
PowerPoint slides should have fewer than fifteen words per slide, and perhaps fewer than ten.
PowerPoint presentations should be photo-rich and content-lite.
PowerPoint slides should be enhancements to the content of the lecture rather than identical to the content of the lecture. (So, someone looking at your ppt presentation after the fact will not know what you said.)
Good lecturers will never lecture for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, and if required to do so, will break up the presentation with activities--group work, a little singing, stretching, maybe a group photo.
(I'm serious. He suggested taking a group photo. Then he actually took a photo of us. That's when the knitting came out.)
Okay, so: I'm picturing myself giving a lecture to the general public on a topic with which they were not familiar. Say, guest-teaching in a Sunday School class on Second Temple Judaism or giving a lecture on theology to a bunch of doctors or one on ecology to a bunch of musicians. Fine. Makes sense. Really, really helpful, actually. Exactly the sort of techniques I would want to use (except for the photo).
But he was talking about the classroom setting. He was telling me that students can't be expected to pay attention more than twenty minutes at a time. He was telling me that the hour-and-a-half lecture sessions which I've attended for seven of the last ten years are impossible to follow. He was trying to tell me that ppt presentations would make my lectures better, but only if they were content-lite, photo-rich, and neatly broken up in to pre-digested chunks so that I don't burden my students with having to concentrate.
He was telling me that when I have a single semester to get through the entire New Testament, I have to use pictures and go content-lite. (And he spelled it "lite"--he's lucky I didn't bring my metal knitting needles.)
He was telling me that by the end of a three-year graduate program, I shouldn't expect a grown woman to sit in her seat for seventy-five minutes and take notes.
He was telling me that between second grade and twenty-third grade (yes, I am now in my eleventh year of post-secondary education), I should have made no progress in my ability to listen and learn.
So, here's my question: was I wrong to think that he was . . . at best, misguided? That maybe the purpose of undergraduate and graduate education is to train kids not to need to take a group photo in order to pay attention? That never expecting my kids to pay attention for longer than twenty minutes also means never letting my kids pay attention longer than twenty minutes? That the purpose of note-taking is so that we can go back and study the material? That it's the teacher's job to offer content for the student to learn, and the student's job to wrestle with the content outside of class?
Am I the crazy one? I can remember attending ninety-minute lectures, hanging on every word the pedagogically hopeless professor was saying, and coming home and reporting it in detail to my hubby (and our poor son, who had to listen to it all). I can remember leaving a lecture in an intro class, fuming, absolutely fuming that I had paid $xyz for that class, "And all I get is twenty minutes of content and thirty minutes of 'group work'??? With a bunch of people who've never read the OT before in their lives?!?!"
I'm all down with the idea that you can't sit a fourth grader down in front of a teacher who lectures for forty-five minutes and expect him to retain and be able to utilize any of that information.
But surely,
surely we can expect more from college seniors, from graduate students. Surely there is something to be said for acquiring the physical and mental discipline that attending to a ninety-minute lecture takes.
Comments (7)
Sarah, unfortunately, I have to agree with everything PPT dude said. You lose them after 20 minutes, so you do need to have activities to keep them engaged. I am very insulted when I pay to go to a conference and the presenter reads the slides to me. I can read. The PPT should merely outline the main thoughts of each slide. In 10 years of lecturing students and nurses I do have to agree.
Sarah..Sarah..Sarah. I must agree with the presenter. This is the TV generation. The typical one hour program is 42 minutes long separated every 15-20 minutes by commercials. ( Think group activity - did you see that! - anybody need a refreshment ? short discussion about what has or is about to happen - oh, and move the laundry from the washer to the dryer - etc ) And, while your attention and interest in learning is commendable - you're not normal. Never were. That's not a bad thing. I'm just sayin.
Oh, pooh. Stephen said the same thing.
He also said I should never teach undergrads.
I actually thought the ppt suggestions were helpful, for those situations in which a ppt-type lecture were appropriate. I just got horrifically annoyed at 1) the idea that he thought I couldn't sit through a forty-minute lecture on how to use power point without, in fact, powerpoint slides to help me pay attention, and 2) the idea that all lectures would be improved by making them powerpoint lectures.
I agree with you, Sarah. I think it's pitiful that academics are giving in to the "entertain me" ADD generation. I love love loved attending lectures and taking notes and soaking up all the wonderful information I could when I was an undergrad and even as a grad student in courses I was assigned to TA - and all of those years *before* the invention of PowerPoint - imagine!
Now, there are boring lecturers, but there are also really great lecturers. I would go so far as to say that lecturing itself is an art form. I study Emerson, who is by 21st century standards almost incomprehensible except to a few academics and their students, but I am reminded of the fact that, in his day, he was not just a writer but a popular lecturer! He gave evening talks to workingmen's groups! Laborers and women and African Americans and immigrants and all kinds of folks used to buy season tickets to lecture series to "improve" themselves. But we can't expect college students to listen to a 60-minute or 90-minute talk?!!
Oh, and I have heard students complain about just the thing you mentioned - that they are paying to hear what the professor has to say (or "profess," if you will), not what their classmates have to say, not to do "group work," not even to watch movies. Now there may be a time and place for those other things (discussion, group work, etc.), but there is also a time and place and subject matter that is best suited for the lecture format. And I won't apologize for that.
That said, I also decided I should probably never teach undergrads again! haha. But NOT because I was discouraged from lecturing. It was reading their papers for 10 years that caused me to lose all faith in humanity ;)
Sarah, as a person in something like the 26th grade, I agree with the presenter about the ppt. It should not be too wordy, and ought to illustrate what you are saying, rather than repeating it. However, it can and ought to be content-rich. I learned the hard way about that! Now I give my students ppt handouts with room for their notes, so they can look at the ppt and take notes on my elaborations.
But I agree with you about the lectures. Oh, maybe not so much for 100 level courses, but for upper level undergrad and grad courses, I think the students need real meaty content. I have gotten so frustrated with professors who want to be all touchy-feely, but are not giving me the high-level lecture I need to understand the material, that I have actually dropped courses.
I cannot imagine a medical-school neurobiology lecture that could be content-'lite.' In such classes, the powerpoint often contains few words, per se, but has complex diagrams and short 'movies' that demonstrate how molecules are working at the cellular level. Definitely not content-'lite.'
My daughter, who is graduating this semester with a degree in Chemistry and in History, has been incessently complaining that she has paid for a Crusades Course in which the lecturer never lectures, but has group discussions. She says she is going to complain to the dean for "breach of contract," as she still has no coherent picture of the crusades (none at all) and this is a 400 level course!
Students want and deserve real content when they are paying over $100 a credit hour! In the med school, it is more like $200.00 a credit hour. But in the med school, no professor would insult his students with content-'lite.'
The old statistics said that average concentration could hold out to 45 minutes, so a 50 minute-lecture was perfect timing when questions were included.
This may have been true 8-10 years ago.Now? Well, they'll never learn if they're never challenged!