An educational system and improved method for teaching students using lessons taught by both a live teacher and by recorded multimedia presentations. The teacher teaches a lesson to the students, and then, divides the students into subgroups assigned to different workstations. Each workstation can include a different but related recorded lesson stored on a recording medium and at least one recording playback device for playing audio and video recordings. After the live lesson, the students begin the recorded lessons at their assigned workstations. The students are required to watch and listen to a recorded lesson and are rotated among workstations to view and listen to each recorded lesson. To determine each student's mastery of the lesson, the students are tested on the subject matter presented by the recorded lesson. Students who fail to meet a predetermined level of performance on the test are required to repeat the lesson.