Active Learning and Interactive Lecturing

What is Active Learning?

Active learning is a teaching approach where students actively participate in their learning process, moving beyond passive listening to deeply engage with course material and construct their own understanding. Students engaged in active learning are thinking, writing, talking, and problem solving to deepen their understanding of the course material.₁

There are many different strategies to Active Learning, and you’re likely already doing this! Some of the most popular strategies to Active Learning are:

Outside of the Classroom and Lecture

Advance Organizers: Advance organizers are tools to aid your students’ understanding of new information by connecting it to already existing knowledge. Prior to delving into a topic or lesson, you would have your students complete an advance organizer. While many advance organizers fall under the category of graphic organizers, you can also use text-based organizers.
Concept Maps: Concept maps are graphical representations of a central concept and its associated information. They provide insight into students’ cognitive organization of content as well as the connections they see between content areas. This can be an individual or group process, completed during class time or outside of class, and utilized before, during, and/or after a lesson or unit. Concept maps can be used as a learning activity and a form of assessment.

In the Classroom

Interactive Lecturing: Lecturing can be one of the most effective ways to deliver large amounts of content to a variety of class sizes. To contribute to higher levels of student success, incorporating strategies to make lectures more interactive is a way to engage students in the learning process.
Learning Pauses: The term learning pause refers to pausing the lecture (or, more specifically, the instructor’s time directly expositing content) to incorporate active learning activities that focus on students processing the information from the lecture.
Problem Based Learning: In contrast to traditional didactic teaching approaches, problem-based learning challenges students at the start of the learning experience by presenting a real-world, complex problem. Students work in small groups to analyze the given information and with the support of a faculty facilitator, begin the PBL cycle.

Other types of common Active Learning strategies include:

Labs
Think-Pair-Share
Peer Review
Writing Prompts

Rethinking Discussion Boards

Discussion boards are often used as a way to facilitate conversation and encourage engagement for asynchronous, hybrid, and even traditional face-to-face courses. Many of us are used to the common pattern of posting a prompt, asking students to respond with their own original post, and expecting replies to x number of classmates’ posts. This structure, however, can leave much to be desired for both the faculty and students. Discussion boards are intended to stimulate conversation, but instead, they end up feeling forced and painful. In order to change that, we can think about how we are structuring discussion boards/forums. If you are looking for simple or more elaborate templates for discussion rubrics, visit the University of Central Florida (UCF)’s discussion rubric site.

Tips for Rethinking Discussion Boards

Small Group Learning

The Journal on Excellence in College Teaching published a special issue focused on small-group learning. The articles in this issue focus on cooperative, collaborative, problem-based, and team-based learning. Visit the link below to access the issue.

Journal on Excellence in College Teaching

1. Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation. (n.d.). Active learning. In Active & Collaborative Learning. Cornell University. Retrieved August 29, 2025, from https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/active-collaborative-learning/active-learning