ABSTRACT
Conscientious teachers want to make intelligent and creative choices about their teaching, but sometimes they don’t know how to do so. For college teachers, the chief obstacle to teaching in more creative and effective ways is a strong but obsolete operative paradigm that sets the rules for acceptable collegiate-level instruction. College teaching has a strong operative paradigm. Lecturing emerged as the new teaching method, replacing recitation and disputation, which held sway during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The lecture paradigm is perpetuated from generation to generation of teachers and students. The greatest challenge to the lecture paradigm is the existence of a body of knowledge about learning that casts doubt on the limited capacity of lecturing to bring about the broad range of intellectual abilities college graduates should have today.
