I felt like my hair was on fire after I finished listening to Don’t Lecture Me! by American RadioWorks.

Stop reading this and listen to it now.

I’ve known forever that lecturing was only effective in certain situations, but I like many of my compatriots use it almost exclusively in my 101 classes. After listening to Don’t Lecture Me! I am more committed than ever to finding a way to reduce the lecturing I’m doing in my classes.

I was particularly affected by the portion of the podcast focusing on Eric Mazur and his work on Peer Instruction (read | watch). Mazur, a physicist, found that the students in his large introduction to physics courses were not learning very much. He argues that this is largely because students come into the classroom with preconceived notions about how physics works based on their everyday usage of “intuitive physics”.[^physics] He found that many of his 101 students were learning the concepts of physics individually without ever connecting them to their larger understanding of physical world around them. So even his high performing students were learning the material, but they were not learning to think like a physicist.* Sound familiar?