Improving teaching skills: from interactive classroom to applicable knowledge

Making the transition from more traditional to more interactive lecturing can be successfully achieved by applying numerous teaching techniques. To use lecture time in the most efficient way, a lecturer should first instruct students to acquire basic knowledge before coming to class. Various in-class activities then can be used to help students develop higher thinking skills and gain better understanding of the studied material. These in-class activities can take many forms (multiple-choice questions of various complexities, compare-and-contrast tasks, quantitative and problem-solving tasks, questions dealing with interpretations of tables, graphs, and charts, etc.) and should be designed to help student integrate their knowledge, to facilitate communication among students, and at the same time to allow the lecturer to closely monitor the learning process as it happens in the classroom.