It may interest you all to note that one of my evaluations criticised
me for wasting valuable lecture time trying to get responses out of
students.  Sigh.  I suppose that as well as illustrating the general
unfairness of life in general, this also illustrates the fact that
students have different learning styles.  The "concrete sequential"
students, or to switch paradigms, the ones that are at about 1.5 on Wm
Parry's scale, not only want but perhaps need a certain degree of
direction.

I think the wisest advice I have heard for a while is the suggestion to
vary teaching as much as possible, giving something for the
top-downers, the bottom-uppers, the general-to-specific and the
specfic-to-general thinkers.

What this means, of course, is that we will never please everyone all
of the time, which if nothing else should be a caution to
administrators not to put too much faith in student evaluations!

Doug