We investigate an interactive teacher-generated drawing strategy in which the teacher constructs a drawing with the help of the students. The students contribute their ideas on how to visualize to-be-drawn concepts, embedded in an interactive process. The present study explored whether learning from a scientific text on plate tectonics could be enhanced by an interactive teacher-generated drawing strategy. A number of studies on student-generated drawings have shown that students have difficulties to accurately represent scientific information (i.e. Van Meter & Garner, 2005). One solution to such difficulties--providing external illustrations for comparison--has not always been helpful (Fiorella & Zhang, 2018), because students need support on how to process the provided illustrations. Ninety-four 8th-grade students (M = 13.34, SD = 0.50) participated in the study. Instructions varied according to a 2 × 2 factorial between-subjects design with "student-generated drawings" (yes, no) and "interactive teacher-generated drawings" (yes, no) as the two factors. The following conditions were applied: reading a scientific text; reading and creating drawings; reading and engaging in the interactive drawing process; reading and creating drawings as well as engaging in the interactive drawing process. Subsequently, the students answered questions about their comprehension (transfer, recall, and drawing). The interactive teacher-generated drawing groups (interactive teacher-generated drawing group, student-and-interactive teacher-generated drawing group) showed better transfer, recall, and drawing performance than the non-interactive groups (no-strategy group, student-generated drawing group). No effects were found for student-generated drawings on the immediate posttests. However, interactive teacher-generated drawings and student-generated drawings enhanced drawing performance in the long term. Interactive teacher-generated drawing can be seen as an effective strategy for fostering mental model building to enhance learning and understanding of scientific text.