First, don’t take yourself out of your lectures by over-relying on technology. Young instructors are often encouraged to intersperse their discourse with a combination of slides, videos and discussions, mirroring the multimodal calls on their attention to which digital natives are accustomed.īut I would like to offer two pieces of advice. In this context, multifaceted lectures have become all the buzz. About a decade later, the computer projector showed up, and PowerPoint slideshows started to take over.
When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, lectures were pretty much delivered by someone speaking at the podium for 80 minutes straight – with some instructors choosing to underscore some highlights with good old chalk on the board.īy the time I got to graduate school, the overhead transparency had emerged as the cool, cutting-edge technology. ‘Turning off the lights is not a great idea’ Some lessons are learned the hard way.Īoife Monks is reader in drama, theatre and performance studies at Queen Mary University of London. Now my lectures are three-quarters finished on purpose.īut I do check that my cardigan is on the right way round before starting. Now lecturing is one of my favourite forms of teaching, not least for how much it’s possible to subvert the format, to surprise the students with what they can do in a big group.
Lectures, it turned out, were not about how much I knew, but about how much they learned. An entire cohort of students could gain an identity as a “year group” by learning communally, sometimes listening in silence (which is a useful skill in itself), sometimes writing alone, sometimes working together. Rather, lectures could work like really big seminars or workshops. I realised that lectures didn’t need to look like they do in the movies, where an old man in tweed – or a young, dynamic man in a leather jacket – holds students captivated via the expression of their charismatic genius. A graduate teaching assistant told me afterwards that the students felt that it had been one of the best lectures of the year. This allowed them to catch up with the material as we covered it, and asking them to have short discussions with their neighbours meant that they didn’t remain passive recipients of the information, but had the chance to process the ideas as they emerged. The fact that I had only managed to finish writing up about three-quarters of the lecture required me to build “thinking time” into it. Inevitably, of course, the students responded to my incompetence with great enthusiasm. I turned to her in relief, thinking she might know how the technology worked, only for her to tell me – kindly – about my cardigan. Finally, as I ran back into the room drenched in sweat, I was stopped by a student midway down the aisle. This necessitated another race to the front desk to plead for help. Arriving at the lecture theatre as the students began to filter in, I discovered an incomprehensible AV system with no evident on switch. While it did so, I searched frantically for the key to open the AV cabinet, which I had somehow mislaid in my race around the building looking for working copiers. That day, all three photocopiers broke down, which meant using the “spare” one that chugged 170 handouts out at a Sisyphean pace. Being new and anxious, I vastly over-prepared but never quite managed to finish writing the lecture. On this occasion, I had been asked to give a guest lecture to 150 first-year English undergraduates on performing Shakespeare – a topic I knew little about. It was one of those occasions, early in my academic career at Birkbeck, University of London, when preparing for a class turned into a living anxiety dream. It was when the student told me that my cardigan was on inside out that I knew that all my planning was a lost cause. ‘My early career anxiety to cover as much as possible often led to students’ feeling overloaded’
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