What is Interactive Teaching

The first thing realisze about interactive teaching is that it is NOT something new or mysterious. If you are a teacher and you ask question in class, assign and check homework, or hold class or group discussions then you already teach interactive teaching is just giving students something to do, getting back what they have done, and then assimilating it yourself, so that you can decide what would be best to do next. Over the last twenty yeras the field of cognitive science has taught us a lot about how people learn. A central principle that has been generally accepted is that everything we learn we " constructed" for ourselves. That is any outside agent is essentially powerless to have a direct effect on what we learn. If our brain does not do it itself,- that is take in information, look for connections, interpret and make sense of it, - no outside force will have any effect. This does not mean that the effort has to be expressly voluntary and conscious on our parts. Our brains take in information and operate continuously on many kinds of levels, only some of which are consciously direct. But conscious or not the important thing to understand is that it is our brains that are doing the learning and that this processis only indirectly related to the teacher and the teacing.