What to know about active learning and college student identities

“Sustained lecturing, or a chalk-and-talk approach, continues to be the dominant mode of instruction across all subject areas—which, as the survey data strongly indicate, leaves more than half of learners behind,” says Thomas J. Tobin, a teaching and learning consultant and founding member of the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Center for Teaching, Learning & Mentoring. “The survey data about the perceived fit of instructor methods underlines a challenge that we’ve known about for a long time: our teaching methods have long been out of step with the learning needs of our students.”