Re: "lecture preparation": a new form of active learning?

"Herman Family" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]/without_any_s/> writes:
>Generally when I lecture I try to demonstrate the material at hand, show how
>it relates to the rest of the entire world, and show how to look at it to
>understand it more easily.  I also push the students to look at the many
>different connections to make between points in the book.

This was in response to my

>>   My idea about lecturing is that there is generally *too much*
>> information in the book for the students to see the big picture, and
>> that's my job in lecture -- steering them through the forest.

Sounds like we agree more than we disagree.  I provide notes
mainly because I don't want my students writing during lecture;
when I was a student I never took notes because I find that I
can't really think and write at the same time.  But if a student
prefers to skip the lecture and just read the notes, because s/he
doesn't get a lot of benefit from the question-and-answer aspect
of lecture, I don't get upset about it.

When we talk about stopping lecturing (still mostly just talk),
part of the idea is that we would instead spend our time offering
discussion sections, or being in the lab sections along with the
TAs, etc.  So the students would get more opportunity to interact
with us in small groups.  (Our lecture sections are 100-150 students
in the upper division, and several hundred in the lower division.)