Textbooks and Teaching

A Modest Proposal: Less (Authority)
Is More (Learning)

Michael Zuckerman

It is easy to denounce the lecture format. It is not so easy to dismantle it or to give it up.	1
Lecturing to hundreds of very smart young people is a heady experience. I talk, they duly note what I say. I stand in the spotlight, they sit in the shadows. I dazzle, they defer to my brilliance. It is gratifying. I like adulation as much as the next guy.	2
But the lecture does not do nearly as much for my students as it does for me. It keeps them from an active, participatory engagement in their own education. And by my lights it does not do anything desirable for society, either. It confirms my students in their understanding of themselves as consumers and of their society as founded upon the star system.	3
I have always been aware that I have more than enough control of my classes. I have always experimented with ways of sharing that control with my students. I am under no illusion that I can abdicate authority. If nothing else, I still assign the grades at the end of the semester. But I have become more and more convinced that I can give some of my control away and still have enough left and that I can give my students a lot more voice in their own education when I do.	4
About a dozen years ago, I instituted my first major change. In all my alleged lecture courses at the University of Pennsylvania—courses with enrollments of a dozen, or twenty-five, or forty students?I began dividing the class into groups of three or four or five, making each of those groups responsible for the conduct of an entire class session. I arrange the syllabus so that we discuss a set of readings every week. The group conducts the discussion on Tuesday, and I respond to the group's presentation on Thursday. I try to tie things together or take things apart. I add to or subtract from what the group said and what the class said.	5
I emphasize to the students that they are welcome to present the texts as inventively and vivifyingly as they can. Still, they always astound me. When I began, I thought they might stage debates or role-plays. Over the years, they have concocted multimedia extravaganzas, composed and performed original music, created their own videos, taken the class on location, staged sound-and-light shows, conducted polls, performed costume dramas, had the class fingerpainting, mounted parodies, prepared food, invited confessions, and much else.	6
The exuberance and daring that my students display is just a part of the pleasure and the power of the group presentations. There is more.	. . .