Interactive Teaching is the formal name given to the approach to education developed in the 1980's at Waikato University as part of the Learning in Science Project. That project's research along with the last twenty years of human cognitive function studies have come a long way in providing us with an understanding of the way the human mind learns.
Interactive teaching is a means of instructing whereby the teachers actively involve the students in their learning process by way of regular teacher-student interaction, student-student interaction, use of audio-visuals, and hands-on demonstrations. The students are constantly encouraged to be active participants.
Understanding and meaning are emphasized, as opposed to mere rote memorization. This facilitates an environment fostering long-term memory retention.
Studies have shown that while one-sided lecturing seems to be the easiest form of instruction for teachers, this form of instruction also promotes the least effective means of long-term memory retention with only 5 % being recalled on average after 24 hours. Recollection through verbal processing was a weak 5% average retention from lecture at 5% and 10% from reading. Recollection from a combined verbal and visual processing came in stronger with audiovisual producing 20% average retention after 24 hours; demonstration resulted in 30% recollection; and discussion group produced retention rates of 50%. Doing practices turned out to be the highest memory retention learning activity of all with 75% recollection from "practice by doing" and 90% average recall after 24 hours from teaching others/immediate application of knowledge.
Findings from a recent study at the University of British Columbia concluded that interactive teaching resulted in a significant improvement in class attendance (increase of 20%), interest in the class instruction, and nearly double rate of complex concept understanding and retention in the physics university course (random guessing produced a score of 23%, whereas the average score increased from just 41% to74 % with the interactive teaching method). And this in spite of the fact that the instructors employing the interactive teaching techniques for the study were much less experienced than their senior professor counterparts.
A local tutorial centre in the business district by the name of Interactive Tutors has been using interactive teaching techniques with great success for their students in the areas of Mathematics, English, French, and Chinese. Their approach to instruction centers on the interactive teaching methods because they work.