Duncan Yellowlees, PhD, (@dyellowlees.bsky.social), who presents himself as a researcher trainer, posted the following on BlueSky:
“Practical tips for maintaining an engaged audience that sooo many academics fail at:
– vary what they are listening to/focusing on
– make sure data is connected to context
– talk to them not at them
– give the impression you want to be there.”
I know he’s addressing researchers presenting their work before an audience of peers (do they really need these tips!?), yet I replied “That’s lovely, but the problem is that students are used to TikTok videos and their attention span is much shorter than it used to be. I teach 90-minute classes (a mixture of lecture and seminar) and they feel eternal to them and to me.” It occurs to me that we never talk about the length of classes, so this is my topic today.
To begin with, I’m uncertain about which vocabulary to use. In the Anglophone countries teachers deliver lectures (50’ to 75’) or teach seminars (1.5 to 3 hours, typically once a week). In Spain there is no such division. We are mostly expected to avoid lectures (‘lecciones magistrales’), which are usually left for guests or special occasions, such as the academic year’s inauguration. Instead, we are expected to use our twice- or three-weekly classroom sessions to teach a mixture of the lecture and the seminar, which we simply call ‘clases’.
When I was a student back in the 1980s the classes I attended were one hour long, three days a week, for each subject (and they were 80% of them ‘lecciones magistrales’ without student participation, with no seminars at all). Then in the 1990s my school at UAB switched to two 90-minute classes a week per subject. In practice, we teach for 75 minutes, because we have a 10-minute courtesy margin between classes and because students start gathering their stuff 5 minutes before the hour, or earlier, whether we’re done or not.
When the 90-minute format was introduced (possibly with the 1992 syllabus), the internet was still to be popularized, and there was no question about the stamina of teachers and the ability of students to remain interested throughout a long session. Progressively, however, this has changed, with some exceptions. In MA degrees it is not uncommon to have two- and even three-hour sessions, and I have taught three-hour sessions in the BA, in elective courses scheduled just once a week (that was NOT a good idea). I have also taught intensive Summer courses lasting one week, with five-hour daily sessions, but that was a chore!
The general rule is that the longer the session, the more time is wasted. If you meet your class three days a week for one hour, you can use about 150 of the 180 minutes. If you meet them for a single weekly session, the 180 minutes easily boil down to 130, because the 20-minute break usually becomes a 30-minute break and you still have a 10-minute delay at the beginning and the tired students abandoning the classroom 10 minutes before time is up. And, obviously, you need a magician’s full bag of tricks to keep students interested for three hours in a text, if what you teach is Literature.
The issue of students’ boredom is as old as education itself, with the difference, as I have often noted here, that current students do not believe in keeping up appearances and show their boredom openly through facial expression and bodily posture. I read recently that the idea that students of all ages, except the very young, should sit up in silence and provide signs that they are listening goes against human nature, but it’s also human nature for teachers to receive feedback. Call me old-fashioned, but I do expect silence (unless students talk to me), a body language and facial expression that indicate attention (no glassy eyes…), and a direct eye-to-eye look (a nice one, if possible). The problem is that students who, by the way, are sitting on awfully hard benches or chairs the whole morning, are losing the ability to respond in that way, or can only maintain it for, say, 15 minutes.
This is why our school suggested that we should change the focus of our sessions every 15 minutes. A 75-minute class, then, should consist of five parts. My niece is a student in another school of UAB, and she is always complaining that her teachers use the lecture format, very often boring students to death by basically reading from a PowerPoint the whole time, with no attempt to vary the pace of delivery or to follow the 15-minute rule. Some teachers just don’t care that their students are bored, and simply assume that teaching is boring. Good for them, but I happen to get nervous when I see bored faces, and have tried, accordingly, to apply the 15-minute rule. But what five parts can one introduce in a Literature class in which the focus is close reading?
What I have done for many years is to use a first 15-minute segment for a brief PowerPoint presentation (in dialogue with the students) or to read from my booklets of selected essays, poems or scenes in key novels. Or both: Power Point and then the ‘extra’ reading, though I overheard students more than once complain that that was ‘wasting’ our time. The rest of the time (45 to 60 minutes) is taken up with close reading, with me proposing that we read and comment on six passages of about 10 lines (I bring to class twice as many, just in case I run out of passages to comment on). I may have the students work in pairs to read the passages and then comment on them together with the rest of the class, or work with the whole class. In years long gone, I often brought to class clips from film or TV adaptations of the novels I teach, but this takes plenty of time that now we need to read the texts. A 75-minute class can fly by very quickly if students have read the texts in advance, or at least the plot summaries, but since this is not happening time drags out endlessly, and 75 minutes feel like 150.
In my elective courses, I have students teach each other using 10-minute presentations usually after a mini-lecture of 20 minutes; their presentations are followed by debate, from the notes I make as they speak. This is a sort of improv-teaching, which I very much enjoy. Some students complain that they don’t want to be taught by their peers but by me, but this is because they have a traditional understanding of teaching, lecture-based. I very much prefer this type of interaction, which is closer to the seminar. The difference is that I usually give each student different texts, or allow them to choose. I’ve taken this practice to the maximum degree in my fourth year compulsory subject, in which instead of presentations, students must talk to each other about the books they are reading (four different ones for each student). That worked well with 40 students last year, but I have no idea how it will work for 70!
In my fourth year class, I have subdivided the 75 minutes into two parts of 35 and 40 minutes. For the first part, I have three activities: a mini-lecture, reading from a text, and a general question for debate. In the second part, students talk to each other, usually with a different partner every 10 minutes. What happened as the course progressed was that students grew impatient with my 35 minutes, as I could see from their body language and reluctance to interact with me. They very much preferred the noisy interaction with their peers, which I designed for them to hear about as many books as possible.
My impression, taking into account my almost 34 years as a teacher, then, is that sessions should not last longer than 45 minutes, and that the students’ actual attention span is about 30 at most. My own capacity to hold forth on a topic is also diminishing, not because I watch TikTok videos, but because, in general, life is now faster in 2025, than it was in 1991, when I started teaching. In conferences, plenary sessions now last for about 45, followed by Q&A; panels are usually 90 minutes long but are subdivided into 20-minute presentations followed by debate. When I am invited to speak, it’s usually for 45 to 50 minutes followed by questions. It makes then, less and less sense to subject students to 75-minute sessions by a single speaker (the teacher!), though I can well imagine what a hassle it would be to have students move from classroom to classroom every 30 minutes (lab practice, of course, is quite another matter).
I’m going back to Duncan Yellowlees’s advice to researchers, which concludes with “give the impression you want to be there.” I do want to be in class building up students’ knowledge, but to be perfectly honest, I’m feeling increasingly embarrassed by the obligation to fill in the 75 minutes of each session. It’s awkward for me and for them. I’m losing the ability to anticipate what will interest them and for how long, so that now I bring to class twice as many items for discussion (if I plan for three, I bring six). If a class is interested in a topic, discussion could and should take up the whole session, but if they’re not interested each single minute drags.
Yet, I hear no conversation about time management in my school or my university, possibly because we’re all avoiding the subject for fear this will lead to a major rehaul of our schedules. Another issue to be faced, sooner or later. Time will tell!