Within the discipline it is frequently the case that there is not complete agreement on the subject's core concepts, and as a result, in my courses I typically treat material from a variety of perspectives.  Students are encouraged to consider individual, organizational, and societal levels of analysis and theoretical perspectives that make each one primary.  I also want students to think about posing testable questions and how to design the means of answering them.  It often takes undergraduates some time to comprehend that political science is not about defending normative positions.  When students are explicitly focused on theoretical perspectives and the means for testing them empirically, they are better prepared to continue their explorations of politics either as participants in another class or on their own.

I try to lead students to a set of conceptual tools and a critical way of thinking which will help them grasp the political world.  I refer to this set of tools as the “comparative method” — it is little more than the basic model of scientific inquiry adapted to reflect the particularities of political science.

The process of creating active learners is not the same across lower division, upper division, and graduate courses.  While the process varies in a number of ways, the most basic difference is the balance between induction and deduction.  Beginning a lower division undergraduate course by bombarding students with a series of abstract concepts and theories is not efficient.  Engaging students with the fascinating facts surrounding the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the establishment and long tenure of an authoritarian regime under Augusto Pinochet, and the redesign of democratic institutions based on lessons supposedly offered by the earlier experience provides the means of talking about larger concepts such as variation in coalition formation and the left-right ideological continuum.  Concepts like the constitutional allocation of powers, the interparty dimension of party systems, and the intraparty dimension of electoral have more meaning to lower division students if they arrive at them inductively by talking about particular cases at particular points in time and variations among them. 

At the graduate level, on the other hand, students are ready to talk about theoretical generalizations and abstract concepts.  Rather than lead them to these inductively, it is possible to make them active learners by asking them to deduce from these concepts concrete means of operationalizing them and empirical evidence for testing their explanatory power.  They can then debate the theoretical and methodological merits of competing scholarly analyses and begin to form research agendas of their own.