College instructors use lecture and its current counterpoint--active learning--widely and often rely on both strategies, but the question of which best promotes student learning has become a debate that ignores the fact that learning can result from both. Students still listen to and learn from lectures. They pass exams, obtain degrees, and function successfully as professionals. Additionally, people learn by doing: research on active learning supports its merits for enhancing affective and cognitive learning--even in those classes that students find difficult or uninteresting. However, contention focuses on how well each accomplishes learning. The authors' premise of this brief forum article is that lecture is neither dead nor necessarily "bad," and active learning is not a panacea. Instructors should build on the interplay between the two when deciding how best to promote learning. The authors argue that there are several ways in which instructors typically make decisions about their in-class pedagogy, and that each potentially limits instructional effectiveness. Teachers should make sound decisions based on the assumption that the deepest learning occurs when lecture and active learning are used strategically and in relationship with one another. [Other articles in this forum include: The Lecture's Absent Audience (EJ1132073); The Lost Art of Lecturing: Cultivating Student Listening and Notetaking (EJ1132054); Lecture and Active Learning as a Dialectical Tension (EJ1132004); What Is the Place of Lecture in Student Learning Today? (EJ1132078); Sage on the Stage or Bore at the Board? (EJ1132063); Rethinking Lecture-Learning from Communicative Lenses: A Response to Forum Essays (EJ1132088); and The Lecture and the Learning Paradigm (EJ1132080).]