Many college faculty lecture for much or all of a class period and then send students home with 1–3 hours of work to complete before the next meeting, or in online classes, they post long video lectures for their students to watch before doing an activity or two. However, the research on how our brains learn new material best show faculty should break up lectures with small activities to check in with what is and is not understood. These “thinking about thinking,” or metacognitive, activities are key to learning new ideas.
