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 constructing their own understanding. Students engaged in active learning are thinking, writing, talking, and problem solving to deepen their understanding of the course material.¹

Why incorporate active learning in your classroom?

 Educational research has clearly established that active learning improves student outcomes and helps them grow and develop as individuals. It helps students develop critical thinking skills, retain and transfer course content, and improves student engagement and motivation. The University of Minnesota has created a great resource on why you should use active learning in your classroom.

How to incorporate active learning in your classroom

There are many different strategies for active learning, and you’re likely already doing it! 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

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