Challenging the one-hour university lecture

We do many things in life because we have always done them that way. This applies even when we know that what we do does not work and is unrewarding. An example is the one-hour lecture at universities, which we go on delivering despite all the evidence that it exceeds the attention span of most students, and is usually less effective in delivering information and stimulating learning than almost any other method.

I became an academic in a rather unexpected change of career in 1990. My first teaching experience was on a new masters’ programme in intellectual disability, which was set up by a colleague Dr Beryl Smith. Our students were experienced professionals working in health and social care, and studied part-time. It was difficult for them to get time for studying, and the course was therefore taught for one three-hour session each week. This presented the problem of how on earth we could maintain student learning over such an extended session.

Fortunately, Beryl has great expertise in teaching, and we used her idea of cutting each session into a learning sequence of different elements. This would usually start with an introduction to assess how much the students already knew about the subject, and their experiences of it. This was essential because the students came from different professions, which meant that their knowledge of different subjects was varied and unpredictable. This also gave students an opportunity to reflect on their experience. We would follow this by an introductory lecture of about half and hour, to set out the field of study. Students were then allocated into groups of four or five each, and set a problem to solve. The ‘problem’ might be an analysis of a research paper, discussion of a case study, or the preparation of a draft policy. Each group would then present their response in a plenary session, and this would be followed by a discussion. There could be three or more cycles of this kind in each three-hour session.

On a masters programme, students rightly expect to be taught by topic experts. Beryl and I did not count ourselves experts across the entire field of intellectual disability, and so we invited outside speakers for several sessions. This had the advantage of exposing students to different outlooks, and so stimulated awareness of the difficult policy and ethical dilemmas that frequently arise in working with people with intellectual disabilities.

Looking back on this experience, I realise that we used so many different teaching methods (orienting lecture, reflection, case studies, group problem-solving etc) because Beryl understood that people learn in different ways. Traditional lectures, by contrast, are based on the assumption that there is only one way to learn: by remembering what the teacher says.

A few years later, our masters programme in intellectual disability was converted to distance teaching on the Open University model. By that time, Beryl Smith had retired. Another colleague and I developed distance texts corresponding to each session on the programme. Individual texts still followed the concept of a learning sequence, but self-completion activities replaced group discussions. We ended up with rather more texts than is usual for distance programmes, but students on the programme tell us that they find our texts stimulating and easy to follow.

Moving to distance education had a disadvantage for me. I enjoyed face-to-face teaching, and now I was doing a lot less of it. I eventually moved more into undergraduate medical education. This was a very different world. Teaching was organised into one-hour lectures to 300+ students, plus one-hour tutorials for small groups. As the number of medical students in the University expanded, the ‘small groups’ did too, and eventually we had 22 ‘small groups’, each with about 17 students. Small group tutorials at that time were usually chaired by a staff member and seemed to follow a defined procedure with a clearly-specified set of correct answers which each ‘small group’ was led to discover. However, it has become difficult in some subject areas to find sufficient academic staff to chair all the ‘small groups’, and this has led to greater creativity, with some staff developing self-directed ‘small groups’ in which students are set a problem, and produce a written response which is loaded on WebCT.

For the last three years, I have helped run a module on health services and disability for second-year undergraduate medical students. This comprises ten four-hour sessions, each on a Monday morning. Working with my colleagues Andy Shanks and Dr Qulsom Fazil, we gave each four-hour session a common theme (‘learning disability’, ‘care and carers’, ‘international health’ etc), and divided responsibility for individual sessions between us. Most of these sessions were scheduled to begin with two hours of lectures, followed by two hours of small group teaching. Weighed down by tradition, I initially planned the first two hours as two one-hour lectures. These evoked the usual polite but uninspiring response from students. So I cursed myself for conforming, returned to my experience in masters education, and renewed the idea of teaching using a learning sequence.

I therefore used the first two hours in each session for a sequence of short (half-hour) lectures from a range of presenters, interspersed with short films and question and answer sessions. I have tried to begin these with a film or a personal account which introduces the students to the reality of disability or being a carer, as the case may be. This is followed by a short orienting lecture to clarify terminology and numbers, and present key issues. Further films and short lectures build on this. I have used outside expert speakers to cover more specialist issues. This ‘blended sequence’ approach has been successful, and I will try and improve it further.

I also changed small group teaching on the module, by introducing tutorials led by individual people with an intellectual disability. These were recruited from groups that train and support disabled people in teaching and public presentations. These sessions were much appreciated by students, and helped them develop empathy for living with a disability. However, they were cancelled for this academic year because no budget had been identified to meet the cost of transport and sessional payment. Yet it is surely probable that the University will reinstate this form of teaching, given increasing national concern about the standard of healthcare received by people with an intellectual disability.

I am now quite close to retirement, and so other people will soon become responsible for teaching intellectual disability to medical students in my university. I am encouraged that my colleagues responsible for the medical degree have a firm commitment to innovative and effective education. I hope that in some way I have provided stimulating company for them.

February Fill Dyke

There are paintings you admire and paintings you want to hang on your wall at home. February Fill Dyke by Benjamin Williams Leader falls in the first group. This is a painting of the utmost realism. No other picture or photograph depicts with such accuracy the damp cold misery of the English winter. This is not the bright sunny cold of the Alps or North America, but the damp clammy cold that creeps into your bones, that is with you even after you have gone indoors, and which can only be driven away by a hot bath. February Fill Dyke also shows the mud and the darkness of winter, when days on end are spent without sunshine or hardly any light, and when the sun has set at four o’clock in the afternoon. What makes this picture particularly important for me, however, is that it may be of my own village. Leader came from Worcester and specialised in local landscapes. The square church tower and the scattered houses of the village could all be Martley in the late 19th Century.

February Fill Dyke is probably the most famous painting by Leader, but it is not widely-known or particularly popular. This is because it does not fall into the second group of pictures, that you hang on your wall at home. Leader does not show a chocolate-box fantasy of rural England, all village green, neat thatched cottages and duckponds. Nor is it the Christmas card cliché of snow, stagecoaches, and quality street. How much better to put on your wall pictures of poppy fields in summer, sunflowers, dancers near the Seine, and so on. The impressionists were no better painters than Leader, but they were better at judging the market.

Is Fox News a Zombie Death Cult?

If you have never been to the USA, you still know what to expect from films and television. The East Coast comprises New York (full of young people leading entertaining lives in Manhattan apartments) and Baltimore (corrupt police and gruesome crimes). The West Coast consists of Los Angeles (film stars and more crime), and San Francisco (gays and more crime). Things are different in the South: long dusty roads, prison gangs and everybody drenched in sweat (apart from New Orleans, which is inhabited by vampires). In the middle of the USA, most of the small towns have been taken over by zombies. These stumble around looking to bite as many people as possible and hence increase the zombie population. Zombies don’t appear too cunning, but are effective because they are driven by an overwhelming and irrational anger.

After you visit the USA, you realise that the films and television programmes are not very accurate, apart from the zombies that is. In the real USA, zombies do not stumble around in blood-soaked rags: they work as radio and television commentators, most of all on Fox News. Here, they can infect people through the airwaves, massively increasing the zombie population. Despite their more normal appearance, Fox News zombies are easy to spot - driven by the same overwhelming and irrational anger, they emit rage at normal people (who in zombietalk are known as ‘liberals’), and worship death. Death-worship takes many forms: there is an urgent desire to spread death among foreign lands; to execute criminals in large numbers; and, most of all, there is adoration of the bringers of death - of guns and weapons of all kinds. Zombies wish that all should carry guns and become death-bringers.

In the films, zombies can only be destroyed, if at all, by extreme violence. Fortunately, real world zombies can easily be tamed. Just change channels, and they will not infect you. If enough people do this, the zombie death cult will disappear.

The Great PowerPoint Disaster

One of the frequent complaints about academics is that they are only interested in their research and neglect their responsibilities to their students. Academics of this kind undoubtably exist, and I have no problem with them. Universities would be a lot more efficient if staff were allowed to specialise in what they do best (or, more precisely, in areas where they have a comparative advantage). There is no point in getting top class researchers to run courses or carry heavy teaching loads. They do, however, have a responsibility to tell the rest of us what they are up to. The best way to do this is to a plenary lecture once a term on new developments in their field. Other academics should be allowed to specialise in teaching if this is what they do best. Teaching, rather than the commercialisation of research, is the most important form of ‘knowledge transfer’ in higher education: without effective teaching in universities, the quality of professional skills in society will decline generation upon generation. We will have wonderful technologies, but no-one able to use them.

Whether academics are more effective in research or teaching is in part a matter of personality. Research usually involves long hours of solitary work and therefore tends to attract more introverted people. Teaching, on the other hand, appeals more to extroverts and the best lectures are a sort of performance art. Extrovert or not, it requires great skill and commitment to lead students into a complex field so that they understand not only its complexity but also the areas in which knowledge is still uncertain. There have traditionally been several ways in which good teachers have achieved this. One is to start by posing a question, and then to look at alternative explanations, their strengths and weaknesses. Others may use a narrative approach, or start by presenting a simple overview of the topic and then progressively adding more complexity.

However, despite the best efforts of academic staff, I have an impression that our lectures have deteriorated in the last decade. I think this is because they have become dominated by PowerPoint technology. No other single invention has done as much to destroy learning as this accursed programme. Instead of analyses and systemic explanations, lectures with PowerPoint have become lists of bullet-points read from a screen. Some teachers enliven their slides by inserting pictures and animations, but PowerPoint has produced a generation of graduates who think knowledge comprises lists of facts. I can see the impact of this in the various government reports I read in my area of study. Where there was once coherent analysis and argument (in sentences and paragraphs), there are now repetitive bullet-point lists. For instance, the most recent Government policy report on intellectual disability (called ‘Valuing People Now’) includes nine bullet-point lists in its Executive Summary and 70 in the main text, all in 136 pages. Bullet-points are interspersed with pictures, personal stories, and examples of good practice. These are all entertaining, but the report glosses over the problems involved in living with a severe disability, and the dilemmas experienced by those who support disabled people on a daily basis. Bullet-points, however neat they look on screen and page, provide a weak basis for effective government action.

A Europatriot speaks

The European Union is, without any doubt, the most successful political creation in human history. Countries which have fought and massacred each other for centuries are now members of the same confederation. The most terrible and destructive wars in history have been replaced by the free movement of peoples, opportunities to live and work unhindered in different countries, a free trade area and (for most members states) a common currency. The Union is continuously expanding. Its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of €12,256.48 billion makes it now the largest economy in the World, and its population of over 500 million is 50% larger than that of the USA. There is a queue of countries applying to join, all changing their political institutions to meet the high standards set by the Union for the human rights of its member states. The Union also runs the most successful space programme in the world.

The European Union has had a profound effect on how its citizens live. People move freely across borders that once involved queues and passports. Lorries drive down motorways where once they would have waited for hours for customs clearance. The once fortified and suspicious borders of Europe have become as permeable as those between US states or Canadian provinces. EU citizens increasingly live and work in each others’ countries. There are more than three-quarters of a million British people living in Spain and 200,000 in France. There are even more French citizens living in the UK. The EU promotes common patterns of work qualifications to ease the movement of labour, while schemes like Erasmus and Socrates make it easy for students and academic staff to study in universities in other EU countries.

This all constitutes an extraordinary change for the better in European history, and should be good reason for rejoicing. In most of Europe, the EU is indeed regarded as an essential part of political life. For smaller members states, it provides a welcome means of making an impact in a world otherwise dominated by the USA and China. Separatist movements like the SNP and Plaid Cymru look forward to their countries becoming full members of the EU. Even in the largest states like France and Germany, politicians accept that the EU enables these countries to exercise greater influence while at the same time allowing their economies to benefit from a massive free trade area. The exception to all this approval is England, whose politicians are silent about the benefits of the EU, while a large part of the political right-wing is ‘eurosceptic’ (a code word used by those who wish to leave the Union). Why has this happened?

The key reason is that the European Union has become a bogeyman for eurosceptics, blamed for all the changes in English life that they find unwelcome. In this respect, they resemble sections of the right-wing in the USA who see the ‘federal government’ (which is also mysteriously part of the ‘New World Order’) as the source of all their ills. The press in England has often supported this nonsense, with silly stories about the EU akin to those invented in previous years about the Greater London Council, trade unions, the Labour Party and all their other enemies. Stories of this kind fill a void created by legal bans on racism - newspapers can no longer abuse people of other races or religions, so the EU has become a substitute representative of unwelcome otherness. Needless to say, the media rarely makes any attempt to explain the institutions of the EU and how they work, thereby supporting the myth that the Union is run by ‘bureaucrats in Brussels’ rather than the more complicated reality of power shared between the European Council of member states, the Commission appointed by national governments, and a Parliament elected by the people of Europe.

Unnecessary venom is a problem in politics because it impedes effective debate, and can lead to terrorism. The Oklahoma bombings (against the US federal government and the New World Order) may one day see parallel attacks against EU institutions in this country. Opposition to the EU is also a distraction from the real causes of our present discontents. British soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan not because of the EU, but because of the subservience of UK politicians to US foreign policy. The dreary standardisation of English towns and cities, and the undermining of rural life are the products not of the EU, but of the centralisation of power within England itself and the close alliance between governments and the large supermarket retailers and construction companies. Economic collapse is the result of the power of the financial sector over UK government, which has resisted regulation (including more effective regulation by the EU) and gained a series of favourable tax concessions which have enriched senior staff at public expense. The present system of government in England thus suits some people rather well, and it is convenient to shift the blame to the European Union.

Speaking for myself, I am proud to be a citizen of Europe. If my house had a flagpole, it would fly the 12 gold stars of the EU as well as the St George’s Cross of England.