12 Surprises When Lecturing Less

The main reason I don’t lecture is cowardice, plain and simple. I have never felt brilliant or knowledgeable or charismatic enough to carry a course on my own. Thankfully, though, I teach in a small department in a small institution where I have the luxury of small classes, so ...

I was sitting around the seminar table with eighteen students in a course on religion and popular culture. To get the discussion started, I asked them about the results of their web-based research on firsthand accounts of becoming a Star Trek fan. Numerous hands went up, research results were shared ...

Pedagogical Confession: I learn from lectures.  I’m one of those people for whom the traditional academy was made.  I listen to lectures on audiofiles (and I have since I was a teenager).  My larger classes in undergraduate and graduate school were large lectures with separate sections led by a ...

My unpleasant memories of middle school English classes are made much worse when I recall how some teachers taught poetry and prose by picking “important” passages and pontificating about them. Learning to “read” poetry was essentially learning to listen to a lifeless lecture.  When I first began teaching I too ...

One of my goals is to be as creative as I can be – in my preaching and teaching. I have not always thought that I was creative, but I have come to appreciate my creativity more in the last few years. However, it’s often very hard to convince others ...