In the Dark

One week to go before the end of teaching term, and it’s time for the dreaded questionnaires to be handed out for the purpose of gauging student feedback on our teaching. The responses from the students go off somewhere to be counted and I’ll get a summary back in due course and learn what the students made of the  series of chaotic and rambling performances I strung together to masquerade as lecture courses. At the end of the year we usually get to see a league table of who’s popular and who isn’t, but the scores aren’t very useful beyond that. More important than the tick boxes are the comments that students write about what’s good and what isn’t. I read through all those and they’re often very helpful in suggesting things to be done differently in subsequent years.

Lecturing has changed an enormous amount since I was at university almost thirty years ago. In those days we got very little in the way of printed notes and we were expected to write everything down in classes that were primarily delivered in the chalk-and-talk style, although some lecturers used overhead projectors. The disadvantage of the latter over the former was a tendency to go too quickly through the material.

As a student I just accepted this was the way things were and developed my own note-taking strategy. I trained myself to be able to write things down about as fast as the lecturer could speak. I did this by cutting out the biggest hindrance to taking notes quickly, which is the business of  making your eyes go backwards and forwards between the blackboard (or projection screen) and paper in front of you. I just wrote everything I could on the paper without looking at it. Although my handwriting was scrappy when I did this, I could keep track of just about everything that was said as well as what was written by the lecturer. Later on, I’d turn these notes into a neat copy and in the process of doing that I tried to iron out any bugs in the original notes as well as figure out things I couldn’t make sense of.

When I started lecturing I primarily used blackboards and chalk. I was teaching quite mathematical things and found this the best way to do it. For one thing the physical effort of writing made me go through the material at a reasonable pace. The other advantage is that I think mathematical proofs and derivations should not just be presented, but should happen as a process for the students to see. I always felt that a lecture would be more interesting if it appeared to be spontaneous rather than delivered from a pre-prepared script. Even if the students disagreed, I certainly enjoyed lecturing much more if there was an element of improvisation in the performance.

However, I soon noticed that many students didn’t really know how to take notes even at the modest speed I was going. They would generally only write down what I wrote on the board, not the little verbal explanations and embellishments I put in. My response to this observation was to make sure I wrote down more and consequently went through the material even more slowly. When I got to sit in as a peer reviewer of other staff lecturers, I looked at what the students around me were doing and realised that the vast majority simply didn’t know how to take notes efficiently or accurately. For many the act of writing things down took so much effort that they weren’t listening to the lecturer. I guess this stems from the changing style of teaching in schools, but even if that is true it is something that university teachers need to come to terms with.

Incidentally, I have from time to time given final-year undergraduate lectures at Italian universities (in English). When I used the same style there as at home – writing full notes on the board rather than just the equations – the students asked me why I was doing it. They all expected to have to write down what I was saying. If they could manage to do that with lectures in their second language, I don’t really see why our students can’t do it in their mother tongue!

Gradually the ubiquitous powerpoint has largely the old-fashioned style of lecturing to the extent that many lecture theatres don’t even have a blackboard. We’re generally expected to hand out complete sets of printed notes, with the result that the students don’t have to take notes of their own but also turning a lecture into an entirely passive experience.

I resisted the move to powerpoint for undergraduate lecturing for many years, but gave up and went with the flow when I moved to Cardiff.  However, what I do is a bit different from the others who teach this way. I generally use slides which have only a few bits of text, key equations and figures on them. I hand out copies of these slides at the start of each lecture and then go through them during the class, and also make the powerpoint files available on the web. This gives them all the important things, but I tell the students I expect students to annotate the handouts and make their own set of notes based on the skeleton I’ve handed out. However, it is clear that many students don’t write anything down at all during the lecture. We’ll see from the forthcoming exams how much they have actually learned.

Newer educational technology should enable us to improve the standards of teaching in universities, but I think there’s still a long way to go before we work out how to use it effectively.  In particular I think we need to question whether lectures in the old-fashioned sense should continue to provide the primary mode of teaching. My personal opinion is that we should be moving to more independent, problem-based, learning and much less of the passive spoon-feeding.  I think we should be aiming to cut the number of lectures we give by about 50% across the school and use the time and effort saved in more creative and effective ways.

We’re in the middle of a review of our course structure in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University and I hope we take the opportunity to make radical changes not just to the curriculum but also to the way we present it. Not everyone in the School is keen on really radical changes. I think I understand why. I actually enjoy lecturing. I always have. It’s fun and it’s also a lot easier to give a lecture than to prepare large numbers of problems and write pages and pages of printed notes. Looking back at my time as a student, though, I am bound to admit that I learnt next to nothing from lectures. This was partly because many of the lecturers I had were poorly delivered but also partly because I’m not sure lectures are the best way to teach physics. We carry on doing it this way just because it’s what we’re used to.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the way we teach physics these days is that it encourages students to think of each module as a bite-sized piece that can be retained until the examinations, regurgitated, and then forgotten.  I’ve no doubt that memorizing notes  is how many students pass the examinations we set.  Little genuine understanding or problem-solving ability is needed. We promote physics as a subject that nurtures these skills, but I don’t think many physics graduates – even those with good degrees – actually possess them at the end. We should be making much more of an effort in teaching students how to use their brains in other ways than as memory devices.