Great article on the lack of value in a lecture.
The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is.
“Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who
would copy them down,” says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland.But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and
now that information is everywhere, some say it’s a waste of time. Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it.
Anecdotally, this jives with my experience; I had a great physics teacher in high school who avoided the lecture, and I learned a ton from him. In college level classes, I learned a lot of math, but walked away with much less understanding of what the math meant.
In my engineering classes, where the method was usually learning by doing, we all seemed to have a better idea of how and why things worked than a lot of the science students dealing with the same material in their lectures.
