When I wrote that “students enjoy a having a variety of activities,” I
wasn’t trying to
gripe about short attention spans. I myself got bored during long
lectures when I was a
student. It’s just that there are a lot of people pushing their own
“active learning”
techniques, and claiming that they work so well that no class time need
be spent on any
other method. Well, just because the method involves an expectation that
the students will
do something active, that’s no guarantee that the students will actually
be fascinated and
stay engaged.
Another common problem with some of the purist active learning
ideologies is that a
certain percentage of the students are guaranteed not to have read the
book. Lecturing at
least a little bit helps get them up to speed, rather being an anchor
dragging behind the
rest of the class. Although the Peer Instruction method was not a real
success for me, I
think Mazur is right on when he advocates little mini-lectures mixed
into the active
learning stuff.
A choppy series of short activities a la Sesame Street can be _more_
boring for students.
One problem I’ve experienced with the Peer Instruction method, for
instance, is that
Mazur’s series of conceptests doesn’t really have any story line.
Personally, I’ve had
better luck by designing a class around a logical development of the
concepts, but using
an eclectic mixture of lecture, demos, and active-learning techniques to
help the students
understand those concepts.