Passive Teaching vs Active Learning

From Teaching and physics education research: bridging the gap (Fraser, Timan, Miller, Dowd, Tucker and Mazur, 2014)

Examples of passive teaching techniques masquerading as active learning include: entertaining lectures, demonstrations, multimedia presentations, recipe labs (hands-on, yes, but perhaps not heads-on), class-wide discussion involving a minority of students, and classroom response systems used primarily for attendance taking or testing memory recall. These approaches can be a useful component to an active learning approach but are not sufficient in themselves. A possible litmus test to determine if an instructor is creating an active learning environment is provided by the following question: in every lecture, does every student present an idea, justify it, and evaluate it through critical feedback from colleagues or an instructor?

I would argue that not only should each student present, justify or evaluate their ideas, but that they should spend most of their time in class doing this. A short quiz at the end of the class doesn’t always make up for 60 min of receiving passive teaching. Furthermore, their justification and evaluation of ideas should be done in the classroom, not at home after class.

Fraser, J. M., Timan, A. L., Miller, K., Dowd, J. E., Tucker, L., & Mazur, E. (2014). Teaching and physics education research: bridging the gap. Reports on Progress in Physics, 77(3), 032401. doi:10.1088/0034-4885/77/3/032401