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.

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.