Sarah Demers, an assistant physics professor at Yale University, describes her experiences embracing active learning models. She writes, “We all know that we can learn by doing. Many of us realize that we learn best by teaching. The act of gathering together the loose ends and tying them up into our own explanation, what I’ve learned to call constructing my own knowledge, is the surest way to adjust our existing framework.” She concludes that “there is a place for lectures in education. They can introduce, motivate and contextualize material. However, we often want classroom time to go beyond equipping students to learn and into actual learning…If we want them to learn we need to cede time to them to struggle with loose ends.”
http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/04/23/when-lectures-fall-short-teaching-tool-essay