There is a difference in teaching knowledge and in teaching skills or behaviours.
I attended a teaching in Melbourne Australia during a Cochrane Colloquium. The teacher was tasked with educating a group of doctors, highly experienced in evidence-based medicine about the barriers and enhancers for people to follow the and practice the best evidence. She had chosen the topic of regular exercise. There is a mount of evidence that regular exercise not only contributes in a major way to not only physical health but also mental health. There were over 80 people in the hall sitting at tables of each about ten people. The teacher asked all people doing regular exercise, at least for 30 minutes, 3x per week, to sit at tables at one site of the hall and the others at the other side. It worked well. About half of the audience moved to one side, the other half to the other side. Then we were asked why we were not following the evidence (my group) and the other groups were discussing why they were following the recommendations of the evidence. After a short time of discussion, groups presented their barriers and enhancers and the audience got the insights through a truly interactive teaching. The whole thing had happened without any person being anxious about being asked questions they possibly could not answer.
The above is a wonderful example of interactive effective teaching of knowledge. I have applied similar approaches to my own teaching sessions. I asked my students to prepare themselves reading about the topic as much as they could in as many sources as they found before the session. During the session, I divided them into smaller groups and within their small groups they discussed answers to questions I gave them one by one. Before the next question was given, one group was selected to present the answer to the previous question given. I incorporated a level of competition between groups and these sessions have been invariably fun and not one student was feeling sleepy during any of these sessions. When students came well prepared the competition was strong and the sessions turned out to be really fun. Teaching and learning can be fun.
If the group is really small, e.g. 5 to 10 students, we give them a study guide with questions before the actual session. Then we discuss without any slides the answers to some of the questions they were given beforehand. All students tend to contribute to such sessions and their active involvement contributes to remaining focused and ‘entertained”. Teaching and learning can be indeed fun.
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Links to other pages on teaching:
of teaching. I have created a few pages on interactive teaching with links below.teaching-skills-we-may-get-it-wrong.
interactive sessions-to-teach-skills
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