The Importance Of Lecture Halls

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Lecture halls are largely ineffective learning environments for most people, typically those who lack metacognitive abilities. Students without the ability to self-regulate and monitor their understanding become lost in the large crowd of a lecture hall. With such a high student-teacher ratio, these students who are unable to fend for themselves cannot excel in this environment without extra, specialized help which most teachers don’t have the time to give. Lecture halls are effective learning environments for some people though, and if more students possessed strong metacognitive abilities, lecture halls could become more successful.
I attended Pinewood, a small private school, from Kindergarten through eighth grade, which is largely responsible for my success in college. With such small class sizes, 40 kids per grade, each student had the opportunity for more individualized help, assessment, and general “bonding” time with their teachers. Teachers could then more thoroughly assess each individual student’s understanding and strategically enable students to monitor their own weaknesses and strengths. Classes usually had a small amount of traditional didactic lecture, and then teachers would walk around as students did their assignment, visiting with each student to monitor their progress and offer them advice. Since the class was so small, this enabled the teacher to actually evaluate and converse with the student and offer them personalized help; and not just “pass by” to see if they were accomplishing their work. Additionally, there was a lot of collective discussion, small group discussion, and reciprocal teaching, where students could formulate opinions, and share their knowledge and strategies among peers.
Hoffman 2
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...ly as possible, so that they can benefit from it throughout their career. The traditional, didactic, large lecture hall is not a very malleable method of learning and does not necessarily cater to different types of learners. However, the likelihood that lecture hall will cease to exist is very slim. Students need to learn how to monitor their understanding and accept responsibility for what they know and don’t know. Teachers, especially when overwhelmed in a large classroom, cannot possibly take responsibility for monitoring all of the students. Therefore, students should develop self-assessment skills so that they don’t always have to solely rely on teachers. The invaluable life-long skill that is metacognition undoubtedly deserves to be taught to children in elementary school, as it will most certainly ease their educational transition into academia.

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