Seth posts this account by a college student who went back to her high school to give a guest lecture on depression to “Mr. Tinloy’s 3rd period psychology class.” Her feelings in preparing and delivering her lecture were pretty similar to my own feelings before doing this sort of thing, and I’ve been doing it for over 20 years!

The college student’s presentation seemed to go well–the students were polite, got involved in discussion a bit, and clapped at the end, and the teacher was helpful in keeping things focused–but when she talked with some friends afterward, one said “she was fighting to stay awake, because the topic did not interest her one bit,” and another said that “it was boring because she wasn’t all that interested in what I was talking about, but it got more interesting toward the end when other students started to talk. `Nobody likes guest speakers, so it’s okay.'”

I have a few thoughts:

1. I suspect the student’s presentation to the high school kids would’ve gone even better if she’d had them working in pairs to discuss the material. When students are working in pairs, they seem less likely to drift off, also with two students there is more of a chance that one of them is interested in the topic.

2. It’s interesting but perhaps not so surprising that depression is not an interesting topic for high school students. Maybe they’d be more interested if it were framed in terms of being happy or sad, or good moods and bad moods?

3. My own lectures to outside audiences) seem to go well (in that people say nice things to me afterward about the presentations) but I usually have difficulty getting people actively involved. It often seems that my talks don’t have “hooks” to grab the audience and motivate them to ask questions and think hard. They more often sit there passively, enjoying it (I hope) but not actively engaged. Maybe I should have them work in pairs. I do this for college students and even grad students—it always surprises them, but they like it—but I’ve rarely had the nerve to try it with nonstudents.

4. In the continuing theme of not practicing what we preach, I should point out that my comments above (including the title of this blog entry) are not based on any systematic research, just on my informal observations of what seems to have worked and not worked for me in the past. (Although it does seem consistent with the literature on active learning, as I’ve abosrbed it by reading a few books on the topic.) What I’m missing is (a) careful experimentation (assigning treatments—different teaching methods—unconfounded with important variables such as characteristics of the class, and (b) outcome measures such as surveys of student satisfaction and performance on standardized tests.