Is Lecture a Four-Letter Word? A Study of Graduate Educators’ Perspectives on Lecture as an Instructional

Dr. Katherine Perrotta, Erica Warren, and Michael Champion Mercer University

Nearly 30 years ago, Alison King (1993) coined the phrase “from sage on the stage to guide on the side” in her study on the benefits of promoting student-centered instruction (p. 30). Her major findings highlighted that student engagement in active learning experiences can help them “to think for themselves to move away from the reproduction of knowledge toward the production of knowledge and [help] them become critical thinkers and creative problem solvers so that they can deal effectively with the challenges of the twenty-first century” (King, 1993, p. 35). In order to foster these skills, which are critical for proficiency in social studies, teachers are encouraged to move away from “the outdated model of education through which teachers transmit factual knowledge to students via lectures and textbooks” (Saavedra & Opfer, 2012, p. 8). Despite these calls for constructivist approaches to foster higher-order thinking and inquirybased learning, Russell (2010) notes that a majority of social studies teachers “are more inclined to passive learning” through lecture-based instruction (p. 70). While lecture itself is not an inherently detrimental instructional method, there is a chasm between research-based advocacy for student-centered instruction and social studies teachers’ preference to lecture “as a most effective teaching strategy” (Bollinger & Warren, 2007, p. 81).

Lecture has long been a contested instructional method in social studies education since the Progressive Era. Among the concerns with lecture are whether teacher transmission of information to students adequately prepared young people for active citizenship and learning basic historical knowledge (Bolinger & Warren, 2007; Henke, 2019; Perrotta & Bohan, 2018). Compounding this problem with lecture and student learning is that many pre-service teachers and in-service educators enrolled in graduate school are entering the profession during the COVID-19 pandemic where the shifts to online teaching ignited widespread concern about student engagement and achievement. As scholarship grows on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teacher preparation (Panther et al., 2021) and social studies education (Journell, 2022), there is a need to examine the perspectives of pre-service and in-service teachers who are enrolled in teacher preparation programs about lecture as an instructional method, and whether the COVID-19 pandemic impacted how and why they make pedagogical decisions to lecture. Therefore, the following questions that frame this study are as follows: