Back to the Lecture

The latter days of August are the warm-up period for the new academic year and a time when professors reorient toward that part of the job which, for many of us, primarily pays our household bills: teaching students. It is a time during which I often contemplate new course content, teaching strategies, and how to make use of innovations that promote what is popularly called “active learning”. These are techniques meant to enhance student engagement in the classroom setting, such as organizing students in small groups that solve problems together on the fly, using peer-to-peer instruction and interactive devices that allow students to ask and answer questions in situ—basically anything other than the “traditional lecture”, defined as the situation wherein students sit (or sleep) and listen (or not) while their professor drones on about material they could just as well read about in the comfort of a local café