Building a More Active Classroom

One of the best ways to encourage students to attend your class, increase engagement with the material, and promote deeper learning is to create an active classroom environment. Students, especially when they are learning foundational material, learn best (and retain information longer) by doing and talking. Any opportunities that you create for students to do the work and explain their thinking will increase their learning of the material.

With the threat / opportunity of AI in education, more faculty are learning that "if it's important, do it in class" is a strategy that improves student learning and engagement.

Strategies

Easy / Quick to Implement or Try

• Chunk your lecture into 7-10 minutes blocks. At the end of each block present students with a question to discuss, short problem to solve, or even just stop and ask for questions.
  • Good examples of questions / problems are ones that address a misconception students might have, check their understanding of a fundamental skill they will need to build on, or ask them to apply what they just learned to a slightly different scenario.
  • For problem solving, have students work alone and then compare their answers with their neighbor after a few minutes.
• After students complete the problem / task, have them share their thought process with you and ask others to add their alternative approaches or ask questions about the process.
• Once the questions are resolved satisfactorily, move to the next portion of the lecture material. Total time for each activity can be 3-10 minutes, depending on the activity.

Medium Effort

• Minute paper: Upon entering the classroom, have students write for one minute about the pre-reading material (or video), including a quick summary, one surprising thing they learned, or questions they still have. Collect these and use them to guide the beginning-of-class activities (clearing up muddy points, discussing surprises, etc.) for that class or the next. This also acts as an incentive for students to do the reading – especially if these are hand-written, collected immediately, low-stakes (no or very few points attached), and used to help answer questions they have.
• In-class poll questions: Use practice quiz questions to help students check their understanding or open-ended questions to gather ideas or examples from students. Consider having students discuss how they responded with each other before you show the answer, then allow them re-vote after discussion. This is often helpful for trickier concepts; students can sometimes teach each other on the spot! This is also a useful technique to extend material you just taught to a related context…rather than telling students how the material is related, ask them a question that requires they extend the material themselves. Make sure to answer questions they have if they get stuck.
• Exit ticket: In the last few minutes of a class session, have students write one thing they learned and one thing they are still confused about. Use this feedback to modify your next class session.
• Group quizzes / worksheets: Have students work in groups of three to solve conceptual (rather than calculation) questions. Works best if the questions prompt discussion and debate / challenge common misconceptions. Distribute one worksheet to each group. Have students turn the completed work into Gradescope (using the group assignment settings). Be sure to collect the hardcopies before students leave in case there are upload issues.

More Difficult / Time Intensive

• Student discussion leader: Have students write discussion questions based on the class reading, then meet in small groups to debate their questions. Group members have roles (leader, timekeeper, note-taker, devil's advocate). The goal is to produce one discussion question to contribute to the whole-class discussion. One could randomly choose two of the day's discussion leaders to facilitate whole-class discussion.
• Whole-class debate: Have students choose a side of the room based on their response to some topic that doesn't have a correct/incorrect answer. Ask students to explain why they hold their belief or opinion. Consider writing ideas generated from debate on the board.
• Jigsaw method: In this method, each student in a pre-assigned group contributes one specific thing to the group's overall task. They might read a particular part of a chapter or a particular article or research a particular aspect of a topic. The class begins with all students who learned the same material getting together to review the basic facts and check their understanding. Then students get back into their pre-assigned groups in which each member has focused on a different aspect of the topic and they take turns teaching the other members about what they have learned.
• Flipped classroom: In a flipped classroom, content is delivered asynchronously before class – either via readings or videos. Students complete a knowledge check on the pre-class material prior to class. The class time is then spent working problems, applying and extending the learning, discussing, debating, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I add active learning to my course, I won't have time to cover all the topics I need to cover. How do I cover it all?

It's important to understand that "covering" material and student learning are not necessarily the same thing. Just because you introduced a concept doesn't mean a student has understood it. Students may not even understand that they haven't understand something. Active learning can help students (and you) quickly assess what students know and what they are still struggling with.

So, first, it's important to clearly define your course learning objectives – not topics – for yourself and your students. What do you want students to be able to DO? This is different from what you want students to HEAR. Second, it is possible to teach as much in an active-learning course as in a traditional course – and students will retain more of the content! This starts by carefully considering what content you should teach in person. This flowchart (Withers, 2016) can help:

Note: It is important to hold students accountable for out-of-class activities that you deem important. If you want them to read material in preparation for class, quiz them on the content before or at the beginning of class.

How do I get all of my students to participate in active learning activities?

It's critical to explain to students why active learning is important to their learning. Instructors who explained to students the benefits of incorporating active learning in the classroom saw decreases in student resistance (Braun et al., 2017; Hayward et al., 2016). Students have a tendency to think that listening is learning, plus, it's easy for them. Explaining that learning happens through doing and talking can help students understand that participating in activities will improve their learning and long-term retention of the material.

In an active class, student participation is necessary and instructors should hold students accountable for participating. But remember: it can also be hard — especially if students come from a cultural background where participation is rare, if they're introverted, if they're used to a more passive model, or if they don't understand the goal of the exercise. So:

• Know why you're doing something.
• Let students in on your reasoning.
• Be transparent and receptive to feedback.
• Check to ensure that students have understood the instructions of the task before they begin it.
• Acknowledge that switching to a more "active" approach will take time, and that it might not happen all at once. It's OK to add a few things every term.

What if "strong" students don't want to work with "weaker" students?

Research generally shows that we learn more by teaching other people. This usually makes sense to teachers: think about how well you learn the material that you're teaching when you have to break it down and explain it to someone else.

Sharing a little about how teaching has made you understand the material more effectively, as well research that shows that "A" students typically state that helping others deepened their understanding of the material, might help students see the benefit of helping each other (Faust & Paulson, 1998).

Varying groups can also help with this problem. Sometimes, students simply feel frustrated because they're working with the same person too often.

As a student, I loved lectures. I found doing activities (especially in pairs) to be really annoying / patronizing / boring / not useful. Why should I consider incorporating more active strategies?

A growing body of evidence shows that lectures are not "natural" or "neutral" formats for imparting knowledge. In fact, this format likely favors certain groups of students over others, as studies have shown. Thus, even if this is your favorite way of receiving information, it's important to consider whether or not all of your students feel the same way.

That said, incorporating more active learning strategies into your classroom doesn't mean that you have to abandon lecturing completely! Striking a balance is still important: classes that are full of only pair work or discussion can be difficult places for some students to navigate just as lecture-heavy classes can be difficult for others. Increasing and diversifying the opportunities that students have to engage with course content will help to ensure that your class reaches more students more effectively.