But I really got into cooperative learning because I realized that the students weren’t learning on a very deep level. I would ask them questions based on material they had in previous semesters—I thought very simple, basic, elementary questions—and, one, they didn’t know the answer for the most part, and, two, even if they did know the answer, they had absolutely no confidence to explain their answer. They weren’t used to articulating the concepts; they were used to filling in formulas on exams to get their grades. I got really frustrated and felt like, “I am wasting my time. If they can’t go out in industry and articulate even the most basic concepts that they have learned here, then why am I doing all this other stuff?” So what I do is I cover much less content, and I have much more cooperative learning, much more class exercises, where the students are interacting with each other.

But one thing I learned very quickly is that if you don’t have a deliverable at the end of the time period—if you just say, “I want you to discuss this or brainstorm this topic or work on this problem”—then they quickly learn they can talk about football or whatever until class is over and then walk out. And so when I say, “You’ve got ten minutes, and at the end of that ten minutes I’m going to pick a team at random to come up and present their results,” or, “I’ll call on a team member at random to explain what you talked about,” or, “You’ve got to put your calculations on this sheet.” . . . what I’ve found is that the deliverable is not really so important. It is the fact that . . . I asked them to give me something. And that comes in handy with the next exercise I have, because then they’ll take it seriously, and they just won’t talk about the weather or whatever.