The lecture is dead, long live the lecture, By Peter G Knight. School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, Keele University

When I first started teaching, back in the Stone Age, I went on a training session to develop my skills in lecturing. Yes, we had training sessions even way back then. And in that golden, wild-west age before health and safety, political correctness, or quality assurance, those sessions were real humdingers. They must have been, because in those days a single 2-hour session was all the University required for a youngster like me to make the transition from newly qualified PhD graduate (no teaching experience required) to fully-fledged lecturer. Training was a session, not a programme. And I think it was optional.

My training session involved me and half a dozen other new staff members each delivering a short example of their lecturing, and then discussing our different approaches. I think we may have been filmed. Perhaps it was set up as part of the session’s cunning design, but watching somebody nervously reading their lecture from an over-prepared script written down on index cards was possibly the best lesson in lecturing I could have had at that time. “Look how bad it can be. Don’t be this.” Even in those primitive times, and even as a youngster, I understood that a University Lecture was not supposed to be like that.

Now, thirty years later, we have recourse to a substantial literature telling us how useless the formal lecture is as a teaching tool. But I like lectures, and I think they still have their place in our teaching armoury. Not the lectures where somebody reads off a script, even if (especially if) the script is nowadays projected on PowerPoint, published on the virtual learning environment and available for replay on the PlayBack system. That’s not what I mean when I talk about lecturing.

For me, the lecture is not mainly about information delivery. Information can be delivered more effectively in other ways. If your idea of a lecture is reading out information from a script, cancel the lecture and post your script online. If you like the sound of your own voice, make a podcast. Recordings are great for students who want to listen to your pearls of wisdom while they do the washing up, walk to the park, or fall asleep at night. But where large numbers of students want face-to-face access to the individual expertise of a small number of teaching staff, the lecture remains an effective way of teaching… as long as you are careful with it! For me, the lecture is primarily about route laying, signposting, and motivation. There is some information content in my lectures, but the real aim is to show students the learning territory that lies open to them, and to motivate them to want to go and explore that territory. The lecture is a facilitating tool, not a content holder.

So what simple steps can we take to make our lectures more engaging and effective?

There are lots of different ways of doing this, depending on your own course context and teaching style, but for me it has been effective to use a blended learning approach in which the lecture is the glue holding together a range of other media. For example, a lecture might have strong online backup including a short topic summary and readings from both undergraduate textbooks and advanced research sources, so I can be sure that students have access to the core content even if I don’t go through all of it in detail in the lecture. Students can be encouraged to do pre-reading for the lecture (not just post-reading) so that they come along already clued up (and perhaps even with questions) rather than turning up saying “what are we doing today?” (or, worse still, if they say “what are you doing today?”). Preparation can be encouraged and enhanced using resources such as YouTube mini-lectures that flag up things for students to wonder about in advance. Or you could post material onto a module’s Facebook page. Students are then familiar with the key points before we start, and the lecture can operate at a higher level than if you needed to run through the basics for 15 minutes. You can see an example of these pre-lecture mini-lectures on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKahbVbo2Ec

For courses where students do preparatory work such as pre-videos or pre-reading, the lecture sessions can be improvised in response to in-class student questions/comments about what they have already done. It is usually easy to predict what students will want to learn more about (indeed you can steer them with the pre-resources that you provide), so you can still “write a lecture” in advance if you want, but then deliver it as a response to the questions they bring from their prep-work. Alternatively, you can simply give the bits of the lecture that become relevant as they ask questions about the video or the reading.

If you don’t want to set up preparatory resources, but plan to “stand and deliver” for 50 minutes, you don’t have to simply stand and deliver for 50 minutes! One effective approach is to break the session into manageable chunks, and to use each chunk to achieve a specific goal.

Here’s an example breakdown of a 50-minute 1st-year lecture, following a model that has worked well for me:

• minutes 0-5: “establish a teachable moment” – in other words, do something that puts the students into a frame of mind where they want to learn. They won’t learn just because you force information on them. They will learn if they feel the desire or need to know something. This can be achieved in different ways. One basic approach is to ask them an interesting question (interesting to them) to which they don’t know the answer or to which you show the answer is not what they always thought. Essentially you need to make sure at the start of the lecture that the students are curious to know more about whatever it is you are covering. 

• minutes 5-20: flag up the key issues in your topic of the day. This is the “core content” section of the lecture, and needs clear signposts and subheadings so students know exactly what to go away and read up on. Remember that you don’t have to teach them everything in class, just show them that it is there and help them to realise that it is important and interesting.

• minutes 20-25: short break, with a reminder that students could take this opportunity to review their notes from the previous 20 mins and identify questions they might want to ask.

• minutes 25-40: present a case-study or counterpoint example (perhaps from an important research paper) that draws together key themes from the day’s topic and perhaps illustrates them in an applied context (or from a perspective that will help shed light on what you did in minutes 5-20).

• minutes 40-45: time to deal with student queries and comments about what you’ve done (including opportunity for them to ask questions they thought of in the mid-lecture break), and time to reiterate your key point. This might be a good point to throw in a quick Mentimeter activity to get student feedback on what they feel they have understood well or have found difficult in the session. Not heard of mentimeter? Check it out at https://www.mentimeter.com/ It is one of a whole raft of interactive tools that are available to help make lectures more engaging. If you don’t want to use technology, then a good old-fashioned 2-minute talk-to-your-neighbour buzz group can work well at this point, too.

• minutes 45-50: a closing activity to reinforce their learning and encourage them to do the follow-up work you may have set. One simple approach here is to give them a short self-assessed or peer-assessed mini-test on what just happened in the lecture. Alternatively, the old-fashioned “conclusions” slide still has its place! Better still, throw them a teaser to prime them for the next session.

Recently I set out to redesign an entire module using that kind of framework as a starting point. I didn’t really stick perfectly to the plan, but making a step in that direction was a big improvement on my previous style. Basically, instead of a 50-minute block covering a set of information, think of half a dozen short blocks of varied content, including student activities, designed to signpost and motivate. If you are adopting an approach like this because you think students have short attention spans (we all have short attention spans), then you can also help by making sure you switch occasionally between different modes of presentation. For example, if your core session at minutes 5-20 is delivered by PowerPoint, then perhaps try using the whiteboard, or a box of sand, or at least a Prezi instead of a PowerPoint for the case study section. Or you could use a video for the opening few minutes, then talk-and-chalk for a bit before going back into PowerPoint.

Mix it up. Stay lively.

The example above is just that: an example. I’m not pretending to be able to teach anyone how to teach. But having looked at my example, take this as your own teachable moment: I know you are thinking you could do it better, and that I’ve missed a trick, or a bit of technology, or a key pedagogic theory. Excellent, then my work here is done: now please go and develop lectures even better than I have suggested!

NB: Some of this content was previously published on Peter G Knight’s own WordPress blog.   
The lecture is dead, long live the lecture, By Peter G Knight. School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, Keele University by Peter G Knight, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://lpdcsolutions.blogspot.com/.

Asking what they want won’t tell us what they need. Discuss. By Peter G Knight School of Geography, Geology and Environment, Keele University

In one of my 1st-year tutorial exercises early in each academic year I ask the new students whether they trust their lecturers and whether they believe what they are told in lectures. The students normally say that they do trust us, and then we have the whole conversation about reliability of sources and the importance of checking everything - including what they are told in lectures - against evidence and peer-reviewed publications. It is an important exercise, but looking at this year’s student evaluations of my teaching I wonder whether I am asking the question at the wrong point in the students’ careers.

It is that time of year now when many of us are getting feedback on our teaching from students as they complete their end-of-year module evaluation forms. When I started lecturing 30 years ago there were no such forms, and I confess with some shame to having played a substantial role in developing and introducing student evaluations. The kinds of feedback that we can pick up through these anonymous forms, or, increasingly, anonymous online surveys, are different from the feedback we used to get in the old days by having conversations with our students. Perhaps the anonymity and distance of the feedback form, rather like the distance afforded by interactions on social media, change the way that people respond when asked to offer, or vent, an opinion. Even in the years since we started using student evaluations of teaching, gradual changes in the nature of the students’ comments have reflected significant changes in our learning and teaching environment.

Even in the best-case scenario, student feedback forms are to be treated with extreme caution, especially when they are read by career-young teaching staff. The level of polite professionalism that we try to maintain in our own communications with students is not always reciprocated by some individuals as they deliver their anonymous feedback to us. In my current role I see feedback addressed to a lot of different staff, including inexperienced staff who are still being mentored, and I try to warn them, before they look at their first batch of forms, to be ready for the small percentage of responses that will be either irrationally hateful or inappropriately affectionate. At each end of the spectrum, there are usually a few forms that challenge the notion that every student’s opinion is a valid contribution to our course development process. One of my personal favourites was a verdict passed on my teaching by an anonymous student asked to comment on the merits and shortcomings of one of my modules, who wrote, drawing together his or her reflections on my year’s pedagogic efforts: “Dr Knight looks like a turtle”.

One of the biggest changes revealed by looking back over years of feedback on my modules is the change in student expectations. On the oldest forms I see students congratulating me for including projected 35mm photographic slides in my lectures. I used the occasional OHP if I wanted to push out the technological boat. The students were very happy with that. Gradually the comments changed to reflect the students’ satisfaction or boredom with PowerPoints, Prezi presentations, YouTube pre-lectures, the flipped classroom and a succession of virtual learning environments from WebCT (remember that?) through to Blackboard. The technological support that students now take for granted was not even imagined by previous generations. Students now will quickly complain about tutors who don’t provide online notes, copies of the slides, very specific set readings, and, now, captured recordings of the lectures themselves. But the students are quite right to expect the latest and best technology, and their feedback (if given thoughtfully) can help us to use it effectively.

Another change in student expectations, beyond the merely technical, is an increasingly prevalent assumption that learning should come easily. Perhaps it is connected to changes in technology. Almost any kind of basic information is now just a few seconds away, a few mobile thumb-clicks away, on Google. Even for more sophisticated academic materials Google Scholar, Web of Science, or the academic search engine of your choice makes even the CD databases of a few years ago seem stone age in comparison. I was brought up on index cards. I was trained to expect learning to be hard work. When you get right into the intellectual puzzles, learning still is hard work, but some students find this to be an unacceptable surprise. Only once, so far, has a student actually told me that they believe their £9,000 fees pay for the hard work to be done by me, rather than by them, but that kind of thinking is out there in the classroom now.

Increasingly over the last few years student feedback on my modules has started to include complaints that my teaching has given the students difficult intellectual challenges, or has required them to search for literature themselves, or has expected them come up with their own research-project designs. This year one final-year student wrote in the “what could be improved about this module” box that I raised lots of questions for long discussions instead of just telling them the answers. I am sure that a few years ago, with a different generation of students, that comment would have gone into the “what went well in this module” box. Most students don’t like clashing deadlines, and most of us may agree with them, but if one of the learning outcomes of a study-skills module is to develop time-management skills, then a deliberately clashed deadline is a learning opportunity. In a research-design module, giving students a ready-made project deprives them of project-formulation experience that will be invaluable to them in future employment. If you are learning a difficult analytical technique, skipping the difficult or boring bits is not good training. We have to recognise that sometimes, a bit like being at the gym, gain requires pain. Learning requires hard work on the part of the students, not just their teachers.

It is important to recognise and respond to student feedback on our modules even if sometimes we think the student is missing the point, or if a poorly designed questionnaire has failed to deliver our questions effectively. Galling though it is when we know that the assessment criteria are clearly set out in the easily accessible handbook, and that they were explained at length in the opening lecture, to have a student say on the feedback form that no, the assessment criteria were not made clear in advance, we can’t just shrug it off. We must consider why, despite all our efforts, this student did not believe the assessment criteria to have been made clear. That piece of student feedback should lead us to look again at the handbook, the timetable, our lecture resources, the scheduling of big nights at the Students’ Union, or whatever else might be contributing to the problem. What we should not do is just ignore the feedback. If that were our plan, we should not ask for feedback in the first place.

But this leads us to a key question. What is it that we are asking for? We sometimes talk about “student satisfaction surveys”, as if satisfaction will be the measure of our teaching quality. It won’t. This is becoming very important as we anticipate the incorporation of student feedback into the TEF. Ensuring students’ short-term satisfaction in a way that it will be reflected in their feedback is a different matter from ensuring their long-term learning, which might be most effectively won by painful hard work. If I were to design a module to make students give me the best feedback, it would not look the same as a module designed for the best learning outcomes. The danger in adjusting modules in response to poorly designed “satisfaction” surveys is that a student’s satisfaction may not equate to their learning gain. I currently lead two 3rd-year modules. One I would describe as competent but dull in its design, while the other has won external recognition as one of the UK’s most challenging, exciting and innovative modules. The competent but dull module has repeatedly and consistently scored 100% positive student satisfaction over the last few years. The exciting and innovative module has so far never scored 100%.

We altered some of our student evaluation questions recently in light of changes to the questions in the National Student Survey. One of our new questions is about whether students feel that staff value, and act upon, student feedback. As part of an institution and a subject area that genuinely does value and act upon student feedback I was confident that the responses to this question would be uniformly positive, but they were not. In the feedback on one of my modules, one student wrote in the “what could be improved” box that I seemed to teach the module the way I wanted to, rather than the way the student would have liked. They threw in for good measure the observation that this was arrogant and condescending of me. An old-timer like me does not get upset by personal comments as much as some younger colleagues may do, but I do take care to think them through. Reflecting on that particular comment I do believe that, on the whole, staff are well placed to know both what students will like and how students will most effectively learn. We try to strike the best balance between those, recognising that students may learn better if they are learning in a way that they enjoy, but also that some learning has to be hard won. From the student’s perspective, sometimes, only part of that is obvious.

That discussion that I have with the 1st-years about whether they trust their lecturers usually includes me inviting them to set out their own programme for the remainder of the course. Most years, the students decide that they would prefer me to do it, because, they say, at this stage in their careers they do not know what they need to learn or what is the best way to learn it. As one of them once said, their dentist never asks them how to proceed with the treatment, and they are happy to trust his judgement. I use that example myself now in those discussions, and ask them whether attending classes and doing assessments is a bit like going to the dentist: not always what they would choose to do for fun, but worthwhile and important nevertheless. If the students can see that the pain of a nine o’clock lecture or a challenging assignment is leading to an eventual benefit, and if we can earn and maintain their trust in us to be doing what is best for them when we schedule those classes and set those assessments, perhaps we can all do our best work.

So perhaps that is the key question that is missing from our surveys: do you trust your tutor to be doing what is best for your learning? If we have not earned their trust, that is something we really need to find out about. I don’t need an evaluation to find out whether I look like a turtle or if I am popular with the students. I need it to check whether they feel they can trust me to be doing a good job.


Asking what they want won’t tell us what they need. Discuss. by Peter G Knight, School of Geography, Geology and Environment, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://lpdcsolutions.blogspot.co.uk/.

Induction week. Welcome on board! Peter G Knight, School of Geography, Geology and Environment, Keele University

It seems appropriate that my first blog entry for Solutions, which I intended to submit for the start of the academic year and which was supposed to be about teaching time management to newly arrived students, should have been delayed by two months because I have been overwhelmed by - amongst other things - teaching time management to newly arrived students.

Most academics think about the start of October in the way that other people think about the start of January: a new year, big hopes, good resolutions, a fresh start. The new academic year brings with it a fresh crop of the bright young intellects that, changing every year, help to keep our own ideas fresh and constantly renewed. It is an exciting, promising time. I have had nearly forty new years now as a university lecturer or student: enough academic fresh starts to fill two of the lifetimes of my average undergraduate. I’ve done this before, and for me it is not scary. But for you, dear student, this is the first time. We see this academic induction, this welcome week, this fresh start, from very different perspectives. And I need to remember that.

We can try to serve as good examples to our students, but we don’t always have to be models of perfection. The fact that I have time-management problems of my own does not undermine my position in teaching time-management skills to students. It strengthens it. I am teaching from the front line of right now, not from long-remembered experiences of “when I was in your position”. I can face a problem on Monday, figure out a workaround on Tuesday, and teach it to my tutorial group on Wednesday. In my mid fifties I can’t pretend to put myself in my new students’ teenage shoes or claim to be facing the same struggles that they are facing as they settle into University. But I can share with them my equivalent struggles, and show them that fighting battles, finding coping strategies, and dealing with everyday academic problems are normal things that we are all learning to do. If a student sees that I am still learning, and still struggling, perhaps the student will feel less inadequate about their own struggles and their own early setbacks. It’s OK to find University difficult. These challenges are supposed to be here.

And here, for me, is the challenge of induction week. We want to be positive, supportive, and encouraging, but we also have to be honest, realistic and pragmatic. We want to say well done for scoring those A-level grades, but we also have to point out that much of what was covered at A-level was fundamentally flawed. Many of my students begin their degrees hoping for clear answers and reliable certainties. I have to tell them that there are no clear answers and that study at University will introduce them to a whole new set of uncertainties. Welcome on board, but hold on tight.

One of my Welcome-week activities that seems to help students feel at home is the start-of-course diagnostic assessment. Students seem accustomed to having lots of tests and quizzes at school, so having a 15-minute short-answer test included alongside the many unfamiliar experiences of induction week seems to steady the ship for some of them. I tell them that the idea of the test is to help me work out the correct level to pitch material in the early sections of the course, and that it will also give them a broad indication of how far their pre-University work has prepared them for this new stage in their academic journey. They do the test, I let them mark their own or their neighbour’s paper straight away while I talk them through the answers, and as I take in their marked papers I give them a handout with all the questions and all the correct answers on it for them to take away. A couple of days later I see the students again, and tell them that in fact the first test was just a rehearsal, and the real diagnostic assessment is today. I tell them to put away any notes or devices, and I hand out the new, real diagnostic assessment. It is, to their surprise, identical to the one they did before. And here I deliver the first big lesson of the week. I was never interested in whether they knew the answers to the questions on the test. It doesn’t matter: they are only at the start of their learning journey. What I am interested in, and what I want to bring into the students’ line of sight, is what they did when they were presented with a body of information - answers - to take away. Usually, none of the students, or certainly very few, have done anything with the handout from the first test or followed up topics that they were unsure about. The marks for the second test are usually no better than the marks for the first. And here is the teachable moment: the students can see that they totally blew their opportunity to do well on the second test by not following up the feedback on the first test; and they see that what I care about is not their factual knowledge but their approach to learning and their engagement with course materials. If there is a “mark” for the diagnostic assessment, it is the difference in scores between test one and test two. Most important of all is what you chose to do after test one. Or perhaps it is what you will do after test two. Welcome to the programme. Welcome to university.

Generally, this two-stage diagnostic assessment works well, but one potential downside is that I am in a small way tricking or misleading the students, and I don’t like to mess with their trust too much early on. It is important that the students see the key lesson from that exercise (why I had to trick them with that first test), and it is important to (re)establish trust quickly through other activities. One small way that I try to do that is by joining in with the students on further in-class exercises that they do. If I ask a tutorial group to take 60 seconds out and try to write a one-sentence answer to a sample question, I take that same 60 seconds and try to come up with a sentence of my own. Not one that I prepared earlier, but one made in the same time that the students are making theirs. I can then be much more believable if I agree (or disagree) with their argument that 60 seconds was not long enough, and they can even sympathise with me a little if, when I read out my own attempt, there is some comical error in it. If the students can then suggest improvements to my attempt, just as I suggest improvements to theirs, then we are (as a happy by product) well on the way towards addressing issues that surround the new NSS question about whether students feel part of a learning community. Of course they do - they are teaching me at the same time that I am trying to teach them. We are all in this together, even if we are looking at it from different perspectives of experience. And that is one of the most important lessons to incorporate into induction week. Even if it means that the time management exercise has to wait until next time!

More about Peter 

Peter G Knight is a Reader in Geography in the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment at Keele University. He studied Geography at the Universities of Oxford (BA Hons, 1980-1983) and

Aberdeen (PhD, 1984-1987) before coming to Keele as a lecturer in 1987. He is currently Head of Geography Programmes, and Course Director for Physical Geography. He has previously served as Director of Learning and Teaching for the School, Chair of the University Academic Appeals Committee, and Chair of several Internal Quality Audits.

Peter has won Keele’s “Individual Award for Excellence in Learning and Teaching” and several Teaching Innovation Awards, and was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy in 2008. Peter’s promotion to Reader was one of the first at Keele to be based on “outstanding distinction and achievement in the conduct, outcome, scholarship and dissemination of learning and teaching”. Peter is the author of more than 50 research papers in glaciology and geomorphology, and has published textbooks both in glaciology and in undergraduate study skills. His most recent book is the 3rd edition of the widely used “How to do your dissertation in Geography and related disciplines” (Routledge, 2015). Peter has recently been working with both the Geographical Association and the Royal Geographical Society to develop learning resources for students at A-level and in transition between A-level and University study. The Geography module “Inspirational Landscapes” (GEG-30014), which Peter developed and leads, was featured by Geographical Magazine as “one of the UK’s most interesting and unique geography modules”.

Induction week. Welcome on board! by Peter G Knight, School of Geography, Geology and Environment, Keele University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.