Christine Harrington

Get this book in the hands of brand new teaching faculty and even more seasoned ones. I know "active learning" is all the rage again the supposedly old, and stuffy, and hierarchical lecture. This book is a welcome antidote. Solidly grounded on research in the SOTL, the authors that the lecture can be a very powerful, efficient, and effective learning tool. The vilifying of the lecture is based on a stereotypical and homogeneous view of what lecture is. There are different types of lectures, appropriate for different contexts. And there are good and bad ways of lecturing, just like active learning, in and of itself, does not guarantee quality and learning.
So, leaving behind the stereotypical view of lecturing, the authors offer multiple strategies, with worksheets and checklists, as well as additional research sources, to make the best of the lecture format. After all, as the authors note, for all the talk of active learning, the majority of college classes are set up as lectures, students expect it that way, and most faculty do lecture, at least in part. And yet, there is hardly any professional development offered dedicated to good lecturing. This book remedies this. And as the authors also show, the lecture may very well be the best teaching strategies for beginners in a field (undergrad and novices of all sorts), so, we need more research-based professional development on this. Start with this book.… (mer)

Harrington and Zakrajsek redefine the concept of lecture in this book from the traditional concept of paper-based, augmented with visuals, one-way stream of information to a complex teaching/learning system that includes learning activities of practice, reflection, and feedback - the dynamic lecture. The book collects different learning and teaching strategies and makes a compelling case based on the existing research.
I am somewhat troubled by their use of the same rhetorical ploy that we have seen in some of the active learning camp - setting up a false dichotomy between lecture and active learning, and then essentially leading the audience down the path of active learning after all. Still, if you want to learn how to improve your lecture by pulling in more student-focused activities, this book may be useful to you.… (mer)

I do recommend this book: it contains both well-documented summaries of the relevant research and many useful suggestions for lecturing in a way that helps students learn. I suspect that any college instructor will find something of value in its pages. I also commend the authors for writing a book that stands up for the humble lecture at a time when it has fallen out of fashion.

That said, this book should have been at least one-third shorter, if not cut in half. The repetition between the chapters is annoying enough, though understandable in a book where the chapters might be used separately. But the repetition within chapters—within, for that matter, paragraphs—is downright painful. (The good news is that the early chapters are the worst; if you stick with the book, it gets better.) I hope the editors take a firmer hand with subsequent books in this series.

There are also minor issues with formatting of the Kindle version that even a cursory read-through by a copy editor should have caught.

[2019-06-19]… (mer)