ABSTRACT
To make the author's way deliberately and systematically into Teaching asStaging, they require a somewhat fuller account and a sharper critique of the familiar alternatives. They can be expeditious. The main aim is to undergird the move to a new model, and in many ways the best arguments for it are its positive virtues. Still, scenario-centered teaching develops naturally out of an understanding of the limits and difficulties of the default pedagogies, and these are steps they must briefly retrace first. Physically, lecturing is built into the layout and design of the majorityof our classrooms, for example with fixed desks meant for one frontalfocus of attention. Of course lecturing often looks good, given the usual assumptions aboutteaching. Lecturers lay out material in connected, articulate, maybe evenclever and entertaining ways, and students quietly write the informationdown in their notebooks. Critics characterize lecturing as a “filling station model” of teaching or, in Paolo Freire’s classic terms, as a bank-ingmodel of education.
