Activities by Classroom Strategy
One reason that lecturing remains ubiquitous in middle division and upper division courses, despite mounting evidence that students learn more when they are active participants in the classroom, is that it is not immediately clear how to implement interactivity in these more advanced courses. Middle-division and upper-division courses differ from introductory courses in that the course goals tend to be richer, the course content more complicated, the students more seasoned, and class sizes smaller. Facilitating activities in these more advanced courses does not obviously follow from techniques that are successful in introductory courses. Teaching techniques need to be aligned with the special character of these courses. We discuss below various teaching strategies that we have used in advanced physics courses and provide links to activities that use those strategies.
