Carl Wieman remembers testing his students after his lectures to see how much they retained, and being depressed by what he found. “They’d remember about 10 percent,” the Stanford education and physics professor recalls. “There was nothing wrong with them—the human brain just doesn’t work that way.”

Instead of lectures, he realized, students needed questions. They needed to wrestle with a problem and talk to each other to really understand and learn the coursework.

In this episode of School’s In, Wieman joins Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and Professor Denise Pope to talk about “active learning,” where students work together and ask questions to understand new concepts and information. What are the proven benefits of this approach for students and educators? And how can we introduce it into the classroom after a lifetime of teaching by lecture?

Listen from the link below, and find more episodes of School's In at the Stanford Radio main page. The show airs Saturdays on SiriusXM Insight Channel 121.