Interactive Teaching

Interactive teaching proceeds from the view that learning is a process that occurs between teachers and learners, and among learners with the guided facilitation of a teacher. From this perspective, learning occurs by doing, and particularly by doing with other people. Interaction with others has the effect of raising a student’s level of performance beyond that which she or he can sustain alone. Students learn as they seize control over novel aspects of skills and understandings that arise in exchanges with others.

To teach interactively, it is important first to identify the specific learning outcomes that one wishes to promote. Thereafter, the teacher can select activities and assignments that will foster the development of identified outcomes. It is not enough simply to involve students in such activities; instead, it is often necessary to teach students how to perform them. For example, an effective group presentation involves more than simply assigning a task and leaving students on their own. It typically requires showing students how to identify and read sources, organize arguments, represent visual data, and engage the class. Interactive learning falters when educators do not provide students with the full range of instruction necessary to achieve learning outcomes.

To know the world is to be able to organize it in terms of existing knowledge. Learning occurs when individuals encounter novel experiences that they cannot readily understand using their existing knowledge. The resulting conflict motivates learners to restructure existing knowledge to reconcile the unfamiliar experience. An effective teacher engages a student’s existing ways of knowing by introducing moderately novel experiences designed to prompt successive transformation in knowledge and skills. Because students construct knowledge through action, interactive teaching provides students with opportunities to participate in activities that allow them to construct skills and knowledge for themselves. However, to say that students must construct knowledge for themselves is not the same as saying that they must do so by themselves. Interactive teaching engages the active processes of the student without reducing the structuring role of the teacher.