Maybe teachers are well educated in teaching methods (I don't know the full curricula needed to be a licensed teacher at various levels), but in my experience t

Maybe teachers are well educated in teaching methods (I don't know the full curricula needed to be a licensed teacher at various levels), but in my experience the variation in teaching styles wasn't very great, those that had variation were the most subject to parent and district and other faculty pressure to conform, and from what I hear it's only gotten more uniform. Teachers may have a job incentive to ensure enough of their students 'pass' the course and demonstrate enough understanding to move on, which can encourage different methods to try and reach more students, but students themselves have a larger incentive to learn the minimum required material somehow regardless of how the teacher teaches which will inflate the pass rate by the amount students can teach themselves what the teachers failed to teach (and little incentive beyond personal desire to learn anything beyond the minimum necessary to advance). And teachers, seeing a high pass rate for method A (which involves a ton of extra work in and out of class on their part) vs method B (which involves such minimum effort it could almost be a 9-5 job) which may have a slightly lower but still acceptable pass rate than A or C or D will in the absence of further motivation coalesce as a whole on B. In my experience very few teachers tried anything different than B. The idea you propose of students being asked to prepare a presentation with the expectation that the other students will only get that info in class from that presentation and will be tested on it later never happened to me for any class. Nor would I want it to, as it's just B (by nature of students teaching via prepared presentation) with the variation that it's even less work for the teacher because the student is doing the teaching. The times I learned from my fellow students (or they from me) were in study/homework sessions outside of class where we went over the source material, our notes, other sources, and talked to each other to try and explain what our teacher's lecture didn't. No one did presentations.