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An issue that has to be dealt
with directly when discussing interactive teaching is the question
of why one sometimes learns a lot in a lecture. We feel that
cognitive science, constructivism, as well as our current work,
provide some obvious answers to this question.
Consider for a moment the great
orators of history, how they moved nations, brought armies to
the battlefield, and shaped situations to their will. Closer
to our own experience is the at least one great teacher that
has influenced and shaped our individual lives. And, we probably
can remember how we were held spellbound by such a teacher as
they reached into our inner selves and made connections that
changed our perspectives. Or, consider plays, theater, and movies,
where we sit absorbed for hours, our attention riveted on the
people and the story. These are ubiquitous events and they are
not that different from each other from a cognitive science perspective.
The common elements between
these events and great lectures are what they do to the audience,
and more specifically, to individuals within the audience. Let's
look at the process in detail. The movie with a story that absorbs
us and touches our emotions, does not do that directly. In fact,
it does not even do it indirectly. It is actually us that do
it to ourselves. The movie is just a piece of celluloid, it is
our brains that interpret the images and sounds and "make
sense" of them. It is the evolving "sense" of
the story within our minds that affects our sensibilities, assaults
or conforms with our principles, and leads us to play "what
if" games as though we were in the story ourselves.
That is, the story itself is new information, and we are busily
engaged for one and a half hours, in fitting it into information,
knowledge structures, concepts, rules, ideas, and nuances that
we already possess within our brains. In this sense, it is clearly
untrue to claim that we are not interacting with the story. We
demonstrably are interacting with it, and you have only to look
at the teary faces emerging from a popcorn reeking movie hall,
after a powerful but sad drama to know that it is not the celluloid
that did it. Similarly, it is not the great orator or teacher
who reaches down inside our innermost selves and turns certain
switches. It is we who do it ourselves in response to the information,
questions, or conclusions presented (however subtly) by that
person.
Good lectures work in just the same way as movies, theater, or
other presentations, and obviously people learn a great deal
in them. It would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise, just as
it would be the height of folly to try to make every public presentation
interactive. Think of interactive preaching, interactive presentations
of research results, or an interactive State of the Union address
by the President. But, these examples may be as inappropriate
as passive lectures on introductory physics! Doubly so perhaps,
because the attention level of the world is changing. At the
end of the 20th century, people are used to having their attention
sought and beguiled by multi-million dollar budgets per minute.
And these become the de-facto standards for public presentations
which include teaching. It is hard to give a great physics lecture
on Newtonian mechanics to live up to this standard. Fortunately,
interactive teaching presents a better and more productive alternative!
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