Dec 17, 08:50 pm: Stop lecturing!

I’m guilty of it. I do it on the phone with my mother and at meetings. I try not to. But I do.

My name is Marnie and I lecture.

And I do it even though I value the conversation. I do it because it’s damed hard not to.

In The Fine Art of (not) Lecturing reporter Louise Brown writes:


Here in the most daunting teaching venue in the country – a three-tiered, chandeliered hall of 1,500 seats booked with classes from Monday to Friday – the cut and thrust of the Q and A survives against tough odds.

If it can make it here, it can make it anywhere – which is good, because it’s the intellectual cut and thrust that opens the brain to deep learning, says Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, Canada’s new guru of science teaching. Wieman, who runs a think-tank on teaching science at the University of British Columbia, was flown here recently to help 500 U of T and York professors rethink how they teach.

His message? Don’t drone. Get students talking and guessing and arguing. Our short-term memory can only process four ideas at a time, he warns, so don’t try to cram whole chapters into an hour. In a nutshell: reduce the load; stimulate the brain.

“I can’t imagine a three-hour lecture, personally, but getting students to flex their brains during class rather than just sit there passively is exactly what we want to see,” Wieman said in an interview.

It’s that interaction – the answering and arguing and persuading – that stimulates protein in the brain, which in turn helps anchor ideas into long-term memory, he says.

So, time what’s going to get your donors engaged? A lecture about the wrongs that need righting? A piling on of statistics? An earnest furrowed brow? Or a question?

One of the big benefit of using interactive tools is to use them to engage people. To ask questions. To get help. But how many folks do that? C’mon. Have you used facebook to get feedback on what your organization is doing? Or do you use facebook to tell people, get them to tell other people?

I taught a workshop with Sue Bennett on web 2.0 tools. It was nice to be in a lab and actually help people signon and search for things that are being said about their organizations. Their topics.

And it was amazing to watch them react to what people were saying. Not what they wanted folks to say. But what they were actually saying and sharing.

I’m just saying. How are using the tools for conversation? For the lively Q and A that will stick in people’s minds?

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Marnie Webb  |