Active teaching means designing curricula and classrooms that are learner-centered (Barr and Tagg 1995). Faculty in active learning classrooms incorporate strategies engaging students cognitively and behaviorally in the construction of their knowledge and skills.  This does not mean eliminating lecture from class times, but rather breaking up content delivery with opportunities for students to interact with the material and with each other. Doing this in the classroom can accomplish many things, including deepening a sense of belonging to the class and the discipline, providing students with opportunities to practice skills with the instructor present to observe and offer suggestions, and giving you, as instructor, the capacity to gauge in real time student skills and understanding.  

In this page, we provide a brief overview of why active learning results in deeper understanding and retention of information, and key aspects to be considered when designing and implementing activities. For those wishing a deeper dive into these design guidelines, there are separate web pages providing more information.   

Since Barr and Tagg (1995) described the potential benefits shifting from a faculty-centered to a learner-centered design of instruction, much research has been done documenting both positive impacts and challenges of implementing active learning in college classrooms. Learning psychologists argue that knowledge growth is inherently personal: we are each of us constructing our knowledge out of what we observe in the world including what we are taught. If we accept this model of learning, then Fiere’s 1970 arguments in Pedagogy of the oppressed become important: knowledge built upon human interactions is more lasting and more transformative than knowledge build upon transmission or ‘banking.’   

Appropriately implemented, active learning classrooms improve learning outcomes for all students regardless of their identities or their educational background. In other words, inequities in educational outcomes – the correlation between outcomes and student identities, context, or background – are diminished or eliminated in active learning classrooms compared to traditional delivery classrooms (Freeman et al 2014, Theobold et al. 2020).  

How to get the greatest benefit for students depends on your practice (Stains and Vickrey 2017). There are four key things to consider when choosing and implementing activities: transparency when communicating why you are approaching learning collaboratively, choose activities that are relevant to the students and the discipline, and implementation that is consistent and inclusive. Lastly, we should seek activities that encourage and support productive peer connections.  

Activities you choose to do in the classroom will depend on your goals for the course, your discipline, and your (and your students’) comfort levels. Below is a short list of common activities; CTL can guide you towards the most appropriate for your setting.  

Importantly, you should experiment and reflect on your experiences and your observations of students’ engagement and experiences (consider collecting feedback from students). Unsettled questions around active learning include ‘dosage’ of time devoted to activities versus time devoted to content delivery, spacing of activities, and activity types and diversity within a single class (Martella et al. 2024). All of these are areas of active research to which your experiences can form a valuable contribution.  

• Think, pair, share is a simple activity where students are given a few minutes to think or write about a question. After that they exchange their thoughts with a partner and then some students share with the whole class. 

• Case studies  and problem based learning (PBL) projects are essentially narratives about a real-world problem that invite students to develop solutions. These pages from Boston University and Cornell University describe how these real-world problems can be used in teaching. The University of Delaware has a PBL repository of tested projects you can explore.  

• Use a “Quick write/Muddiest Point” prompt. Pose a question and ask students to write their answer during class. Example questions include: What was the most important thing you learned today? Or, what was the most confusing thing for you today? The Muddiest Point question is also useful for planning where to start in the next class session.  

• Check-in/check-out prompts. Done twice a week, on the first and last class days, you can use these to collect information about how out-of-class assignments (check-in) and how activities in class (check-out) were experienced by your students. Check-in questions about the readings can also identify points you need to spend extra time on.  

• Try a Jigsaw activity. Students work in small groups and learn about an aspect of a complex topic or solve a problem. They are then regrouped so that each new group is composed of students who worked on different topics, and they take turns explaining their findings or solutions. Traditionally this requires a lot of student movement around the room (which can be beneficial for creating community as students tend to always sit in the same location). You can implement this in high enrollment classes by handing out the different problems in alternate rows in the room and having students form their new groups by simply turning around to those behind them. Elizabeth Barkley offers a way to implement this popular student engagement technique using collaborative instructional technology. (Note this link will take you to Barkley’s book Student Engagement Techniques on UVM Libraries E-book collection and will require logging in with your UVM NetID and password.)  

• Peer-instruction with polling. Originally proposed by Mazur (1997), polling through aps like  iClicker Cloud or through lower tech alternatives such as colored cards can reveal how well students understand and implement the problem solving strategies you are teaching. Mazur’s peer-instruction format requires that we present a problem, have students respond using a polling mechanism, then ask them to work with peers seeking solutions followed by a second poll. This is not attendance.  You can also poll students using Microsoft Teams. 

• Promote active note-taking. Note taking is believed key to learning when we do lecture, but many students do not have effective note-taking habits (Reed, Rimel and Hallett 2016). Teach students note-taking strategies such as Cornell Notes, or provide pre-class outlines with blank areas for their notes through your Brightspace course. Encourage students to make meaning as they take notes (‘in their own words’ rather than verbatim), and to flag points for asking questions.   

• Promote and demonstrate good learning habits. Students often confound short term recall with learning. We can choose sequences of content and activities in class that encourage them to practice active recall and connection building that result in deeper learning. Understanding how we learn: a visual guide  (in the UVM ebook collection; Weinstein and Yaba 2019) is a ‘graphic book’ approach that students can find helpful as they learn how to learn, also with hints for faculty on teaching to increase learning.   

 Students are often resistant to active learning. It is more work for them to be active listeners, engage with problems and peers, and build their own knowledge. We therefore need to clearly and transparently explain our reasons for asking them to do this work (Winkelmes 2023). The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project collects examples of the impact of transparency and resources for increasing transparency. 

Increased transparency also includes lifting the veil concealing the ‘hidden curriculum’ of non-academic skills we often assume students have (Koutsouris, Mountford-Zimdars and Dingwall 2021).  

"The hidden curriculum is about unintended messages, underpinning norms, values and assumptions that are often so unquestioned that they have become invisible. This is because educational institutions operate based on policy, guidelines and expectations that reflect widely accepted principles about what a higher education institution represents, what it means to be a learner, what counts as knowledge etc."

 When we become aware of our own assumptions about what our students already know and can do, and actively test those assumptions by talking to and observing students as they work with the content and practice the skills we want them to learn, we discover not only gaps in their skills that impede learning, but gaps that make our traditional assessments inaccurate (for instance, poor test-taking skills related to over-reliance on on-line testing in their prior educational settings).  

Connecting to students’ lived experiences, recognizing the cultural capital that they bring to the class, will increase their engagement with the content, their willingness to work through challenges, and their retention of the new information (Artze-Vega et al. 2023). Carefully chosen content, problems, and activities are key to maximizing the benefits of the learner-centered curriculum by fully engaging students in their learning (Damron and Mott 2005; Liu and Breit 2013). The Universal Design for Learning guidelines includes a list of considerations that increase engagement through choice, authenticity, and fostering an inclusive classroom where students are willing to take intellectual risks.  

There is no question that adopting a more learner-centered strategy with opportunities for students to explore the content and skills while in class reduces the time available for content delivery. Careful content curation, where we consider exactly what content is aligned with the goals of the course, is covered in another CTL page. Here, the focus is on allowing the time to implement the activities you have chosen in a manner that maximizes student learning benefits.  

Improperly implemented activities may have little or no impact on student learning, and may increase opportunities for microaggressions towards and isolation of students from minoritized groups. One of the most widely adopted activities is polling, therefore it is the most studied. As originally designed by Mazur (1997), there should be two rounds of polling with students working in pairs or small groups between responses. As often adopted, the peer instruction portion of the process is often dropped. However, polling alone has little or no impact on learning; the opportunity to discuss the problem and path to solutions with peers is key to the learning gains (Turpen and Finkelstein 2009). 

Proper implementation also requires that we create inclusive environments where students trust one another and trust us. While Freeman and colleagues (2014) found significant differences between traditional delivery classrooms and classrooms with at least one active learning strategy, work since then has revealed that the impact of the activities depends on frequency (Theobald et al 2020), classroom climate (Dewsbury et al. 2022), and faculty mindset (Canning et al. 2019). 

Peer connections are very important for resilience, retention, and success in higher education (Fjelkner-Pihl 2022). Careful structuring of collaborative work is needed, however, to ensure that all students gain the benefits without suffering microaggressions or stereotype threat. For instance, Malespina and Singh (2024) found that same-gender groups benefited female-identifying students, and Neill and colleagues (2019) advocate for better training of teaching assistants to reduce gender biases in chemistry classrooms.  

McPherson, Collins, and Gallen (2019) provide guidelines for creating more equitable, inclusive, and educationally productive groups across identities and differences in ability. Their recommendations include allowing sufficient time for reading and thinking, structures for establishing roles and responsibilities, and built in contingencies for inconsistent contributions. Important for all group work is transparency and alignment with the course learning objectives: informing students why they are being asked to work in a group, and why collaboration is a disciplinary expectation. Lastly, if a high value assessment is a group project, build in early low-stakes group activities with assigned membership as ‘training groups’ experiences to increase peer-peer trust and improve students’ connections with more peers.