So what are all of the other 34 students doing while ONE student is "getting intensive assistance" from the teacher, or getting his/her questions from the lecture answered?
The problem with that kind of mental model is that in any class of 35 students, probably three of them-- at a minimum-- will have the same question about the lecture presentation... on any given day, over any given material.
Asking those things in real time rather than going to EACH student to find out what questions they have... means that the teacher has only spent 1/3 as much time on that question.
That's time that then is freed up for OTHER activities.
I see problems with the "learn this, then come back" approach that are a bit difficult to get across to anyone without considerable classroom experience. There's a REASON why teachers offer instruction to groups of students all at once, and mostly it is to benefit the students themselves.
As long as there is only one teacher and twenty or more students, one-on-one time just isn't going to be adequate for >80% of them, and it's got little to do with the relative quality of the teaching, though of course awful teaching makes it worse.
I'm a big believer in experiential learning and cooperative learning within a classroom. It benefits everyone in that classroom, and it's a GOOD reason to have students working on the same material at the same time-- and at roughly the same rate. It's a time-tested model, and the Socratic aspects of it have certainly stood the test of time as well, I'd say.
I think it is a dreadful mistake to throw that particular baby out with the bathwater.
