by Amy Pate
Drawing on illustrations ranging from refrigerators to icebergs to Nietzsche to restaurants to architecture, Ken Elzinga, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, spoke last week on how to lecture effectively to large classes.
Teaching great lectures is about "selecting a manageable amount of material and attaching very memorable illustrations and stories to it," Elzinga said to the faculty members and graduate teaching assistants who made up most of his audience.
Elzinga, whose introductory economics class regularly enrolls more than 1,000 students, spoke as part of the Chancellor's Lecture Series on Great Teaching.
Elzinga identified two styles of classroom teaching, Apollonian and Dionysian, in his lecture. "Apollonian teachers identify with their discipline. Dionysian teachers identify with their students," he said. "An Apollonian teacher lectures with rectitude and understatement. A Dionysian teacher lectures with flair and exaggeration.
"Great teachers have come anywhere along the Apollonian-Dionysian pedagogical spectrum. The master teacher is one who chooses a teaching style somewhere along this spectrum that fits his or her persona and dovetails with the discipline being taught."
Key components of effective lecture classes are meticulous preparation, fresh use of examples, attention to the preferences of students, an appropriate classroom setting and attention to matters such as syllabus and test construction.
"Refrigerators and lectures both need to be cleaned out or emptied occasionally of items that have gone stale," Elzinga said, noting that he is always on the lookout for relevant examples to freshen his lectures and keeps a filing system of them. Only a brilliant lecture doesn't need revision, he said, quoting his colleague William Bright in defining a brilliant lecture as "one where the students respond by carrying you out of the lecture hall on their shoulders and parade you around the campus."
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“Refrigerators and lectures both need to be cleaned out or emptied occasionally of items that have gone stale”
— Ken Elzinga, Professor of economics, University of Virginia
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"However, a brilliant lecture serves no purpose if students aren't paying attention to it because they can't hear or are distracted by an unfavorable environment. Good teaching in lecture format requires a "willingness to bleed and die over audio and visual technology, over lighting, over classroom ventilation," Elzinga said.
Quoting architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Elzinga told the audience "the God is in the details" when it comes to course design. "That's true about syllabus design, test construction, care in grading," he said. "When you're sailing around icebergs, it's what's below the waterline that really counts, and the subterranean portion of a large class affects output quality profoundly."
Most of all, effective teaching only comes with hard work on the part of the teacher. "Most great teaching does not come so much from inspiration as from perspiration," Elzinga said.
The result of successfully teaching a large lecture-format class is "having students who have a lasting appreciation for the subject," Elzinga said.
Elzinga's lecture was sponsored by Center for Teaching.
