Almost all college faculty members have heard about active learning, collaborative learning, interactivity; about the guide on the side who has replaced the sage on the stage; about learning as a product of the students' engaged, constructive powers rather than the residue of instructors' delivery; about the bankruptcy of the banking model. And, though there are some of us for whom such notions are fashionable nonsense or even justifications offered by those who refuse to do the real work of teaching--that is, telling students, in as powerful and elegant and effective a way as possible, things which they need to know but don't--most faculty, it seems, acknowledge that listening to lectures may not be the best way to learn.

Nevertheless, a lot of lecturing does go on. There are many reasons for this, economics being the most significant. In the real world, faced with a room containing 450 students, most college teachers must lecture.

Lecturing: Case Studies, Experience and Practice is a book designed to comment on this real world. The editors, two Australians and an Englishwoman, identify their aim:

One of the challenges for lecturers [i.e. for faculty, whether they teach by lecture or some other way] in higher education has been to take the traditional "lecture slot" and turn it into a good learning experience for students. This is in fact how we have approached the definition of lecturing in this book.

That is, they define a lecture by the following indicators:

• The session has been timetabled as a lecture (as opposed to a seminar or tutorial);
• The expectation is that one lecturer will be responsible for delivery to the whole group, which may have a large number of students;
• The session is face to face or replicates this (eg video of a lecture);
• There are desired learning outcomes for the students.

This clearly covers much territory.

What follows is a series of case studies or vignettes. Each is designed as a sort of problem; after the statement of the problem, which includes some questions to ponder, the author explains what solution he or she found, and there is discussion of that solution. There are seventeen of these, followed by a bibliography.

The editors commend the "bravery" of those who contributed the case studies, and after reading them I think that is appropriate. One contributor reports falling asleep in his own lecture; another describes her embarrassment when a student points out her own lack of information on the topic she is lecturing on; a third, a visiting lecturer who was insufficiently prepared, was sacked after receiving bad student feedback. In general the cases lean in the direction of practical difficulties with practical solutions, rather than theorizing.

All these chapters are worth reading. The one I found must interesting was "Getting to Know You," in which a 23-year-old ABD who has never been given any guidance on how to teach, describes being thrown in at the deep end, assigned to "plug the teaching gaps"--that is, lecture on applied psychology to large groups of people who were not psychology majors, including nurses, policemen and podiatrists. He received negative feedback both from his students and from his colleagues, who mocked him for teaching podiatrists. His solutions required no paradigm shift: he learned students' names, he met them outside of class, he found out something about podiatry, he visited the teaching center.

While such vignettes as these may disappoint readers looking for a magic potion or teaching Lourdes, they should reassure others. Failure to succeed at large lectures, especially when unprepared for teaching and/or lecturing somewhat out of field, is to be expected, but it need not be continued failure.

One minor point: many of these lectures put enormous, naïve faith in PowerPoint. Their stories suggest that PowerPoint is never the solution to their problems, and it often seems to be part of the cause. This should give many of us something to ponder.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville