Don’t Lecture Me — Don’t Lecture at all

Steven B. Zwickel

April, 2025

After many years spent becoming educated, I realized that I get nothing out of lectures. It turns out that I am a visual learner—that is my learning style.

Visual learners get information by seeing it. We access information in our memories by remembering what it looked like—that is called the visual cognitive style.

Talk until you are blue in the face, and I probably won’t remember much of what you said, which is why I don’t listen to podcasts or online lectures, even good ones like TED talks. No matter the topic, I have to see it to understand it. Give me pictures every time.

According to statistical data, about 65% of people are visual learners, <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6513874/> which means they get information and store it in their brains from things they have seen, rather than what they have heard. Another 25% get information from hearing it (auditory learners) and the rest get it by touch, taste, smell, etc. (kinesthetic learners). 

Most of us start out as kinesthetic learners; babies smell things and put everything in their mouths. The Freudians call this part the “oral stage.” Eventually, babies learn that certain sounds have meaning, so “mama” means someone will come and hold you, etc. 

Most, but not all toddlers and pre-schoolers are auditory learners; they get information by hearing it. But our society requires literacy, so the schools spend many years turning children into readers and visual learners. Some children are not able to make this transition, which can be a disadvantage in life. (However, I know some very successful people who are auditory learners and, not surprisingly,many of the engineering students I taught were a combination of visual and kinesthetic learners)

 {If you ever wondered what “Sesame Street” is doing when they flash a big number 5 on the screen and repeat “five, five, five, five” until adults want to scream, they are trying to turn auditory learners into visual learners.}

In addition to having a learning style, the way information is represented and processed by a person’s brain is called cognitive style. Researchers think  a relation exists between learning style and cognitive style. The research shows that the information processing is linked to the preferred learning style of an individual (Ahn et al., 2010). Thus, every individual has their own preferred learning style. 

-Jawed, S., Amin, H. U., Malik, A. S., & Faye, I. (2019). “Classification of Visual and Non-visual Learners Using Electroencephalographic Alpha and Gamma Activities”. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience, 13, 86. ttps://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00086

In 2001, I attended a Faculty College run by the University of Wisconsin System at UW-Richland. The purpose of the College was to help faculty and academic staff improve undergraduate teaching and learning. Participants enroll in two seminars for 2½ days. I chose to attend seminars on  “Teaching for Understanding by Design” and “Teaching with Style”.

I spent 2½ days listening to lectures about how professors shouldn’t lecture. I think these folks were on the right track, but it was disheartening to see that even these experts on teaching couldn’t practice what they preached. The presenters explained the importance of reaching the 65% who are visual learners, but they never explained why Universities tend to ignore this and shove hundreds of students into large lectures, where they learn nothing. 

Lecturing goes back hundreds of years, to the Medieval era when universities began in Europe. The first universities were designed to prepare young men for careers in the church; later the curriculum extended to include law and medicine. 

Traveling scholars were invited to give talks on their areas of expertise to faculty, students, and community members. Since few people in the audience were literate, the scholars would read to them from a paper. That’s how “Giving a Paper” became the primary mode of education, even after literacy became more widespread.

Professors today still go to conferences and “present a paper” to their colleagues by reading it aloud to them as though they were pre-schoolers at nap time. 

I’ve known how to read since I was five and I now find being read to insulting. We really should replace this archaic, patronizing practice with real debate and discussion.

[When I retired, people told me they thought I must be  happy that I now had the time to spend listening to the great lecturers. I thanked them because I knew they meant well].

Before we had cheap photocopying and electronic communication, it made sense for a learned professor to share his writing with an audience by reading it aloud to them. For some bizarre reason, this archaic way of communicating persists into the 21st Century. 

Our professors lectured to us, so we lectured to our students, even though we knew that that was not the most effective way of helping students learn. We—all of us who taught  in post-secondary education—were bound tightly by a long tradition of lecturing that we seemed reluctant or incapable of escaping. Some of us tried to break out of the mold and add interactivity, hands-on exercises, or more student involvement. But, if our carefully planned, in-class activities didn’t work out, or if we felt the pressure of cramming a lot of material into a too-short semester, we reverted to type and started lecturing. 

Students hate going to lectures. They find most lectures boring and repetitive of what is in the textbook. When a lecturer tries to pack too many ideas into a 50-minute class, the students become note-taking automatons, digesting nothing in an attempt to get everything down on paper as fast as possible.  (I have been told that while students are supposedly watching a lecture on Zoom they actually spend that time on their phones.) 

Let’s get rid of lectures altogether. They almost never add anything to what is in the textbook, they are often a useless recitation of facts (which can easily be found elsewhere) and they discourage thinking and processing.