BY MELISSA CHADBURN

In 2023, I was confounded by my humanness as I entered my first full-time visiting faculty position in my mid-forties. The brain fog. The creeping anxiety. Feeling my confidence and capacity to speak in front of other people vanish, even though I had a lot of experience with public speaking, panels, and reading my work in bookstores. I had even performed in a hilariously competitive reading series called Literary Death Match. None of that prepared me for my mind being hormonally hijacked as I spoke in front of a room full of twenty-year-olds, lecturing and criticizing myself internally at the same time. Me, visibly mortified, trying to make my way to The End. The end of standing in front of people, the end of uncomfortable clothing, the end of interacting at all. The end of the day.

Why not a little exposure therapy? I reached out to my campus’s Center for Teaching and Learning and asked if there was a way to gain practice and support around lectures. They said they didn’t currently offer a lecture workshop but encouraged me to host one. I placed a call out to faculty across disciplines and across the consortium of colleges: “Like TED TALKS . . . but for lectures.”

We met bimonthly during lunch over the course of two semesters. I attribute much of the workshop’s success to the fact that lunch was provided. Along with support from the Center for Teaching and Learning I was awarded a professional development grant to help pay for books, food, or other materials.

Initially, because of the title of the workshop, we viewed notable Ted Talks and took notes. One struck me as an example that might apply to lecturing in class, political philosopher Michael Sandel’s talk “Why We Shouldn’t Trust Markets with our Civic Life.”

I’d gotten some gift cards as incentives for students who participated in class and responded correctly to low-stakes quiz questions. Sandel’s talk is great for many reasons: He models naked lecturing, using no index cards and no nervous moving around, and he didn’t rely too heavily on his PowerPoint. He polled the audience, and finally he stepped off the stage and engaged the audience in debate. The irony was that his topic was all about how we should not incentivize our children to do things like chores or homework. And remember, I’d brought along these handy-dandy gift cards. As much as I’d viewed and admired this TED Talk before, I’d completely forgotten what it was about.

This dovetailed well with what Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopdis state in The New College Classroom. They offer an anecdote of people walking out of a TED Talk exclaiming how life-changing and unforgettable the talk was, but when these same audience members were surveyed, they were unable to recall even basic facts from the talk. Our first lesson: Find ways to incorporate engaged and active learning and move away from lectures. We became the Anti-lecture Lecture Workshop.

Were there opportunities to offload some of the lecturing? For example, an organic chemistry lab professor struggled with presenting the same boring safety lecture every semester, especially to students who had already had this lecture in previous semesters. We suggested that perhaps the students could give the safety lecture. A theology professor was searching for ways to connect her students to an assigned reading, and we suggested inviting the author to the class on Zoom. It was helpful that we were from various disciplines, because we were confronted constantly with what we did not know. For instance, I found myself inquiring if a colleague could use physical representations or simulations rather than equations or flat diagrams on a PowerPoint slide.

The next lesson had to do with the length of a lecture: chunking. We found that no lecture should be more than ten minutes, so we looked for opportunities to break up the lecture in increments of ten minutes or fewer and then break out into discussions or activities.

My lectures were often correlated with readings. In my classes, I assigned students presentations on portions of the readings to establish whether they had read them. I supplemented their presentations with a lecture to offer information they may have glossed over or other key points. The students giving the presentations had done the reading, but there was no way to tell if other students had. Since lecturing and presentations didn’t solve the reading problem, I realized that reading could solve the reading problem! This began the biggest shift in my teaching yet. In lieu of presentations, I’d ask students to bring mugs, and I’d bring a large hot water carafe, an array of teas to choose from, and some light snacks. I’d play soft music, and we would all sit and read quietly together for the first half of class and then discuss the reading during the second half.

The final lesson is that if the purpose of a lecture is only to verify that students have done the reading or measure students’ understanding, it likely can be replaced with doing the reading together in class, discussion, or low-stakes quizzes. Something else remarkable happened: I was able to be present and enjoy my students. Although in-class reading limits the number of pages I could assign, doing stuff together in class, while drinking tea and listening to classical music, makes this feel like a delightful intellectual hang.

One adaptation I’ve made to this praxis since developing it is that for longer readings my students do outside of class I have them read hard copies. Even for pdf assignments, I have them print an actual copy and annotate their readings by hand and photograph and upload their annotations to the learning management system; then we sit around and discuss their questions and ideas together in class. I love literature and creative writing, and these things are likely best examined at a chiller, softer pace. Things take the time they take.

Collaborating with colleagues across disciplines made confusion, fumbles, or omissions clearer the moment we presented to one another. Practicing our lectures together brought to the surface the vulnerabilities our students experience every day, and, like our students, we were met with the gift of attention.

Melissa Chadburn is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Pitzer College. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove (2022), was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award.