To Arrive Where We Started . . . Changed

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

What have we learned through our exploration of lecture these past two weeks?

First, we have thought about the temporal flow of a lesson (a unit, a semester, and beyond).

We start by building purpose. That involves a complex bringing together of prior knowledge, interest, excitement and, perhaps most crucially, a sense of disequilibrium. For a purpose to be set, there has to be some sense that effort is needed to reach a goal. That the world needs another look. That is how we invite students into the world of learning.

We then move into the “body” of our lesson. With lecture, we are not only conveying content, we are building up various organizational schema that allow students to arrange their knowledge. Hierarchical outlines, timelines, and Venn Diagrams are not just graphics onto which we take notes, but are powerful heuristics that should help students interact with meaningful content.

Of course, as with any other instructional strategy, lecture can potentially forward our goal of critical thinking by exposing students to multiple perspectives and interpretations of events.  Indeed, perhaps more so than many other strategies, lecture is actually ideally suited to do so.  The roots of lecture come from the Latin, lectura and legere, meaning: to read. In that way, we can think about a good lecture as a concise summary of years of reading.  We share with the students some of the fruits of our labor (understanding that it is ultimately the student’s labor that matters). We seek to inspire by giving them a glimpse of the possible.

We conclude our lessons by returning to those places where we began, understanding that we should be different people because of the experience we have just undergone. We assess knowledge, skills, and dispositions. We seek evidence of growth and change. We try to understand if our teaching has made any difference.

Teaching, as we said, is both a circle and a line. Combining those images, we can see it as a continuous spiral, a projection and retrospection, all as we seek to deepen and enliven our present.