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High school affects students for the rest of their lives, which means high school educators wield a powerful influence. Some old ways in U.S. high schools must change if our country's future is to be as bright as possible. If we are to equip practitioners to lead the changes, we must also break ranks with the institution of inservice training.

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Graduates of natural resource programs are entering a profession with increasing demands for strong interactive and collaborative skills. Active participation in guided collaborative experiences during their college careers can enhance students' abilities to perform effectively after graduation. In addition, much cognitive research indicates that learning can be enhanced through social interaction, an element that is sometimes missing in the college classroom. The objective of this article is to describe how faculty members in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University have begun making the transition from teaching-centered to learning-centered classrooms. Specifically, this article outlines the coordinated approach that has been taken to incorporating active and collaborative learning strategies in a group of six integrated courses in the forestry curriculum. We discuss the curriculum, the integration of learning-centered pedagogy into the curriculum, the cooperative skills and interactive strategies that we emphasized, and student responses to this pedagogical shift. Survey data collected from students during fall semesters 1998-2001 indicated greater student awareness of how their own learning occurred, the importance of interaction with both peers and faculty for their learning, and an increased level of interaction with college faculty than students had previously experienced. Student ratings of this set of courses also indicated that the learning-centered curriculum was effective in engaging them as learners, improving their communication skills, prompting their curiosity to know more, helping them apply fundamental principles to new problems, and developing the ability to think critically.