teaching - What to do in recitation?

Forgive me if this is not the right place to ask pedagogical questions, but it seemed the most appropriate.

I am a TA for a programming/CS course. This is my first time teaching recitation and I'm not really sure what the best approach is. What I've been doing is covering what the professor asked me to, with a mix of lecturing (which I don't really like as I feel the students get enough of that) and me solving problems on the board with their help (which is OK but it's usually the same students answering the questions).

I can think of several different methods of recitation:

• Lecturing (elucidating ideas or going over proofs)



• Solving problems with the students


• Having a class discussion, which sounds great, but coming up with discussion topics for this type of course is difficult, I feel


• Having the students solve worksheets (which seems unnecessary considering they already have enough homework)


• Or having them work together in groups to solve more difficult problems

Can anyone provide insight for which of these ideas are most effective?

Further information: It's a summer course, so the pace is pretty fast. Furthermore there are three recitations a week, each an hour and a half. It's the second CS course, so it's mostly programming (data structures and safe code) with a bit of theory thrown in.