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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

> It's fun and pretty easy to give a lecture though, which is why they persist.

o_O!?

Fun and easy? I like to think I'm pretty good at giving a lecture, and it takes me real work to give a good one. Especially when teaching to beginners.

And "active learning"--that's even MORE work. Teaching a single sophomore CS class with automated testing running on the assignments was about 50 hours per week of time.

In addition, effective active learning requires that the students have a lot more interaction with the teacher and other students. Now it's not a 3 hour lecture, it probably has to be more like 6 hours. And has to be split across multiple days because holding someone's attention for more than about 3 hours is simply not possible (and even that's difficult).

Lectures persist because active learning would cost a lot more.

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It takes a lot of work the first time, and less work for each subsequent delivery.

As a performer, I enjoy standing in front of a group of people and commanding their attention. It's fun to make them laugh, after all. That said, lectures are pretty easy. Write a story, speak clearly, and write legibly. Congratulations, you did it. Active learning environments require more work from the instructor, but they actually work better.

Lectures persist for a few reasons:

Once you have a notebook of prepared lectures, provided primary compensation is not based on educational outcomes, most faculty will preferentially reuse the work they've already done.

Most faculty, being faculty, are among the small fraction of the population who could learn effectively from lectures. They are inclined to like lectures, and to see nothing wrong with them.

Most university classrooms were built to deliver lectures, not to foster active learning environments. Fixing this would cost more, but a lot of universities are building active learning classrooms because the results speak for themselves.

Don't forget another important point here: most lecturers at the post-secondary level are not teachers. That is, most of them have little to no formal training in how to educate others. It still kind of blows my mind that, to my knowledge, not one of my university instructors/professors, despite being subject matter experts, is credentialed to teach children - at any grade level - in a public school.

Not only that, but it is likely that they will have received no teaching training at all. When I was hired as lecturer I was just told these are the classes you need to teach and then left on my own to figure it out.

Teaching credentials do not effect teacher quality. Whether at primary or secondary level the best predictor is years of teaching experience, with measures of subject matter expertise (a Master's degree in the subject they're teaching, not education) and measures of general intelligence (IQ tests or close enough like GRE or SAT) also having large positive effects. The additional effects of more experience end at around six years experience.

Teaching qualifications have an effect on teacher performance that is not reliably distinguishable from zero.

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