It’s extremely different than preparing for a lecture. For a lecture, it’s the easiest thing in the world to go to a textbook and pull out different quotes and pull out the important ideas and elaborate a bit on them while you’re talking in class—even if it’s a technology-assisted lecture, like lecturing from PowerPoint slides, which is very easy to do; it’s very easy to use PowerPoint and think that you’re doing elegant or wonderful pedagogy. On the other hand, you can do cooperative learning on a chalkboard rather easily. But really, the preparation, you really have to build in flexibility and build in a very tight structure at the same time. You have to know what you want to have happen by the end of the class. You don’t have to do that for a lecture. A lecture, usually the goal is, cover this material. With cooperative learning, you shouldn’t really start it unless you know what you want the students to be able to do by the end. And if you can do that, if you can write your learning objectives in that kind of a format, then there are infinitely many approaches—learning experiences—that will get them there, including traditional cooperative learning exercises—named exercises, I call them—or things that you invent on the spot.

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