4: Engaging Minds with Active Learning
- Page ID
- 45447
\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)
\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)
\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\) \( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)
( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\) \( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)
\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\) \( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)
\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\) \( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)
\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)
\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)
\( \newcommand{\id}{\mathrm{id}}\)
\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\)
\( \newcommand{\kernel}{\mathrm{null}\,}\)
\( \newcommand{\range}{\mathrm{range}\,}\)
\( \newcommand{\RealPart}{\mathrm{Re}}\)
\( \newcommand{\ImaginaryPart}{\mathrm{Im}}\)
\( \newcommand{\Argument}{\mathrm{Arg}}\)
\( \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\| #1 \|}\)
\( \newcommand{\inner}[2]{\langle #1, #2 \rangle}\)
\( \newcommand{\Span}{\mathrm{span}}\) \( \newcommand{\AA}{\unicode[.8,0]{x212B}}\)
\( \newcommand{\vectorA}[1]{\vec{#1}} % arrow\)
\( \newcommand{\vectorAt}[1]{\vec{\text{#1}}} % arrow\)
\( \newcommand{\vectorB}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)
\( \newcommand{\vectorC}[1]{\textbf{#1}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vectorD}[1]{\overrightarrow{#1}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vectorDt}[1]{\overrightarrow{\text{#1}}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vectE}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash{\mathbf {#1}}}} \)
\( \newcommand{\vecs}[1]{\overset { \scriptstyle \rightharpoonup} {\mathbf{#1}} } \)
\( \newcommand{\vecd}[1]{\overset{-\!-\!\rightharpoonup}{\vphantom{a}\smash {#1}}} \)
\(\newcommand{\avec}{\mathbf a}\) \(\newcommand{\bvec}{\mathbf b}\) \(\newcommand{\cvec}{\mathbf c}\) \(\newcommand{\dvec}{\mathbf d}\) \(\newcommand{\dtil}{\widetilde{\mathbf d}}\) \(\newcommand{\evec}{\mathbf e}\) \(\newcommand{\fvec}{\mathbf f}\) \(\newcommand{\nvec}{\mathbf n}\) \(\newcommand{\pvec}{\mathbf p}\) \(\newcommand{\qvec}{\mathbf q}\) \(\newcommand{\svec}{\mathbf s}\) \(\newcommand{\tvec}{\mathbf t}\) \(\newcommand{\uvec}{\mathbf u}\) \(\newcommand{\vvec}{\mathbf v}\) \(\newcommand{\wvec}{\mathbf w}\) \(\newcommand{\xvec}{\mathbf x}\) \(\newcommand{\yvec}{\mathbf y}\) \(\newcommand{\zvec}{\mathbf z}\) \(\newcommand{\rvec}{\mathbf r}\) \(\newcommand{\mvec}{\mathbf m}\) \(\newcommand{\zerovec}{\mathbf 0}\) \(\newcommand{\onevec}{\mathbf 1}\) \(\newcommand{\real}{\mathbb R}\) \(\newcommand{\twovec}[2]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\ctwovec}[2]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\threevec}[3]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cthreevec}[3]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\fourvec}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cfourvec}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\fivevec}[5]{\left[\begin{array}{r}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \\ #5 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\cfivevec}[5]{\left[\begin{array}{c}#1 \\ #2 \\ #3 \\ #4 \\ #5 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\mattwo}[4]{\left[\begin{array}{rr}#1 \amp #2 \\ #3 \amp #4 \\ \end{array}\right]}\) \(\newcommand{\laspan}[1]{\text{Span}\{#1\}}\) \(\newcommand{\bcal}{\cal B}\) \(\newcommand{\ccal}{\cal C}\) \(\newcommand{\scal}{\cal S}\) \(\newcommand{\wcal}{\cal W}\) \(\newcommand{\ecal}{\cal E}\) \(\newcommand{\coords}[2]{\left\{#1\right\}_{#2}}\) \(\newcommand{\gray}[1]{\color{gray}{#1}}\) \(\newcommand{\lgray}[1]{\color{lightgray}{#1}}\) \(\newcommand{\rank}{\operatorname{rank}}\) \(\newcommand{\row}{\text{Row}}\) \(\newcommand{\col}{\text{Col}}\) \(\renewcommand{\row}{\text{Row}}\) \(\newcommand{\nul}{\text{Nul}}\) \(\newcommand{\var}{\text{Var}}\) \(\newcommand{\corr}{\text{corr}}\) \(\newcommand{\len}[1]{\left|#1\right|}\) \(\newcommand{\bbar}{\overline{\bvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\bhat}{\widehat{\bvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\bperp}{\bvec^\perp}\) \(\newcommand{\xhat}{\widehat{\xvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\vhat}{\widehat{\vvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\uhat}{\widehat{\uvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\what}{\widehat{\wvec}}\) \(\newcommand{\Sighat}{\widehat{\Sigma}}\) \(\newcommand{\lt}{<}\) \(\newcommand{\gt}{>}\) \(\newcommand{\amp}{&}\) \(\definecolor{fillinmathshade}{gray}{0.9}\)The best ideas come to those who engage.
Active learning is a teaching approach that encourages students to participate actively in their education through discussion, problem-solving, and collaboration. Rather than passively listening to lectures, students engage with the material in ways that require them to think critically and apply their knowledge. This hands-on approach allows them to explore concepts more deeply and develop a stronger grasp of the subject matter.
By using techniques like group discussions, case studies, and interactive exercises, active learning helps students move beyond memorization and into meaningful engagement. These methods encourage them to analyze information, make connections between ideas, and develop problem-solving skills. This process not only enhances understanding but also makes learning more dynamic and enjoyable, helping students retain information more effectively.
One of the key benefits of active learning is its adaptability to different learning styles and subjects. Educators can experiment with various techniques to find what works best for their students and course content. Whether through hands-on projects, peer collaboration, or guided inquiry, this flexible approach ensures that learning remains engaging and impactful. By tailoring methods to fit different needs, students can develop a deeper appreciation for the material and gain skills that extend beyond the classroom
Common Active Learning Techniques
While the active learning strategies described in this section vary in form and complexity, they share several core characteristics:
- Student-centered: Each technique shifts the focus from instructor delivery to student engagement and participation.
- Collaborative or reflective: Most involve interaction with peers or structured self-reflection.
- Constructivist: Students actively build understanding through doing—generating, applying, discussing, organizing, or evaluating ideas.
- Flexible: Many of these strategies can be adapted for use in small or large classes, and in face-to-face, hybrid, or online formats.
At the same time, these strategies differ in how they are best applied, depending on your goals:
- To surface opinions or spark discussion: Try Opinion Line-Up, Polling and Voting, or Structured Debates. These help students clarify their perspectives and engage with diverse views.
- To organize or deepen ideas: Try Sticky-Note Clustering, Concept Mapping, or Cumulative Brainstorming to foster synthesis, organization, and integrative thinking.
- To apply or transfer knowledge: Try Application Cards, Decision-Making Scenarios, or Case-Based Decision-Making to promote real-world relevance and higher-order thinking.
- To encourage peer engagement and feedback: Peer Review, Think-Pair-Share, and Fishbowl Discussions offer structured interaction and formative learning moments.
- To prompt individual reflection and quick feedback: Minute Reflections and Polling provide low-barrier ways to check understanding and support metacognition.
By choosing strategies that align with your learning outcomes, classroom context, and students’ needs, you can make active learning a consistent and purposeful part of your teaching practice.
Opinion Line-Up is an interactive activity that prompts students to consider their position on a complex issue and discuss it with peers. By physically or virtually placing themselves along a spectrum of opinions, students clarify their reasoning and engage with diverse perspectives.
Sticky-Note Clustering is a collaborative activity where students generate ideas individually and then work together to categorize and organize them. This activity combines brainstorming with critical thinking to deepen understanding of a topic.
Dotmocracy is a visual and participatory decision-making process where students allocate “votes” to express their preferences or priorities. This strategy fosters discussion and collaboration by making group opinions visible.
Fishbowl Discussions involve a small group of students engaging in a focused activity or dialogue while the rest of the class observes. This strategy promotes deep engagement, critical reflection, and collaborative learning.
Cumulative Brainstorming encourages students to generate, critique, and build upon ideas collaboratively, fostering critical thinking and teamwork.
Think-Pair-Share is a collaborative learning strategy that encourages individual reflection, peer discussion, and class-wide sharing to promote deeper understanding and engagement.
Minute Reflections are quick, written responses that encourage students to summarize, question, or reflect on their learning. This activity is simple to implement and provides immediate insight into students’ understanding and concerns.
Structured Debates are formal discussions where students take opposing sides on an issue, defending their positions with evidence and reasoning. This activity develops critical thinking, argumentation skills, and an appreciation for diverse perspectives.
Concept Mapping involves creating visual representations of relationships between concepts, fostering understanding of how ideas connect. Students map key terms, ideas, or processes using diagrams, linking them with lines and labels to show relationships.
Application Cards challenge students to apply a concept or skill to a new scenario, fostering transfer of knowledge and critical thinking. By engaging students in this process, instructors can assess students’ ability to make connections and use concepts in novel contexts.
Peer Review involves students exchanging their work and providing feedback to each other, fostering collaboration, critical thinking, and self-assessment skills. By evaluating their peers’ work, students gain insights into their own understanding and approaches.
Polling and Voting involve asking students to respond to questions, scenarios, or problems to gauge understanding, elicit opinions, or spark discussion. It can range from quick polls to more elaborate voting activities that shape the direction of a class discussion.
Decision-Making Scenarios challenge students to take on the role of decision-makers, analyze a complex issue, and propose solutions. This strategy helps students apply knowledge to real-world or hypothetical situations, developing critical thinking and collaborative skills.
Case-Based Decision-Making combines real-world scenarios with the critical thinking process of making and justifying decisions. It engages students in applying theoretical knowledge to practical problems while evaluating multiple perspectives and possible outcomes.
Laying the Foundations for Group Work
What is the idea?
This short chapter discusses a group activity designed to promote team cohesiveness and open-mindedness in the context of a Business Research Methods undergraduate course. Students had to work in groups (of 3 or 4) for the duration of the course to produce a research report addressing an identified business problem, but many groups faced challenges due to the absence of a shared vision and teamwork skills. Similar problems were encountered in another course on Integrated Marketing Communications, where students worked on a lengthy group project. To address these issues, a formative hourly activity was implemented early on in the term. This activity works best with classes of 15-20 students, and it can be implemented in most courses adopting a team-based active learning approach.
Why this idea?
Team-based active learning is based on the cooperative learning pedagogy and produces numerous benefits for individual learners (Espey 2018). Permanent student groups (ie, groups that are formed for the duration of the course), unlike temporary ones, require students to tackle interpersonal difficulties and to appreciate the benefits of group work (Michaelsen 1992). Team processing skills, one of the elements of cooperative learning, are conducive to building a learning orientation, yet for students undertaking lengthy group assignments, team cohesiveness needs to be built from the onset (Laverie et al., 2008).
The activity was implemented in 5 different small cohorts within two different undergraduate courses, in both of which students had to undertake a demanding group project. The activity was inspired by the need to address practical challenges encountered in class and by other activities discussed in Dawson (2016) and Parker and Goldrick-Jones (2011).
In the first part of this activity (role-play), students work individually, drawing freely on their own experiences and understanding of teamwork; they receive a hypothetical scenario in which each student is assigned the role of a ‘mentor’ for a group of younger students who are supposedly embarking on a group project. Their task is to generate five tips/ pieces of advice they would give to these younger students to guide them in collaborating fairly and ethically. In most of the runs of this part of the activity, it was observed that students tended to generate tips mostly drawing on their (negative) past experiences (e.g., ‘think carefully before choosing who to work with’, ‘be prepared to fight with friends’).
In the second part, students work in their assigned groups. They are presented with a list of statements/ rules of group work (a list of statements generated by the instructor or derived from literature). Statements refer to a climate of respect, open-mindedness, resolution of conflicts (indicatively: ‘All members will respect [other] team members’ ideas and promote a positive working attitude’, ‘If a disagreement should arise, all group members will address the problem in a prompt manner via further email discussion or in a group meeting’, ‘Each team member will be available for discussion or if help is needed by others’, ‘The team will collectively negotiate expectations to keep the team and the project moving’, ‘Conflicts will be resolved in a respectful manner giving each team member an opportunity to voice their opinion’ (Parker & Goldrick-Jones, 2011, p. 306-307). For this part, each group must discuss and select the three most important statements under the same hypothetical scenario. The Instructor observes group discussions without intervening, keeping notes.
In the third part of the activity, groups cooperate to produce a commonly accepted ‘group code’ by negotiating the terms. The Instructor briefs students on the importance of establishing a common set of rules for their group project. This part requires students to incorporate at least one of the statements suggested by each member in the first part and the statements selected in the second part. Students can also insert other statements that are deemed necessary (for example, many groups of students added statements referring to time management and the need to respect internal deadlines agreed upon by the group).
In the last part of this activity, students reflect on their learning in the form of a class discussion, and they are asked to reflect on their group decision-making processes. They are also encouraged to compare their individual ‘solutions’ to the problem in the first part with the group ‘solutions’ in the third part. The Instructor provides additional feedback, and each group finalizes and signs the contract that will guide subsequent group work.
This activity has received positive comments from students; in the vast majority of cases, it was observed that individuals considered the group's "solution" to be more comprehensive and elaborate than the one they had initially produced, appreciating the merit of their peers’ contributions. It is interesting to note that many students remarked that they liked the idea of agreeing on specific terms for group collaboration.
How could others implement this idea?
Other instructors can supplement the second part of this activity with the introduction of a scoring system to streamline the groups’ decision-making process and/or insert an individual reflective component. In a modified version of this activity, students completed individually a short anonymous questionnaire reflecting on their own contributions after the third part. For the last part of the activity, the Instructor can additionally provide tailored feedback for each group.
Transferability to different contexts
This idea is flexible and adaptable to courses in different fields; it is suitable for skills-building courses. Class sizes need to be small to permit Instructor observation and class discussion in the last part. The activity could also be easily adapted for online courses.
Sources and Attribution
Primary Sources
This section is informed by and adapted from the following sources:
- University of Waterloo, Centre for Teaching Excellence. Active Learning Activities. Available at: Waterloo CTE (opens in new window)
- Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University. Active Learning for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Available at: Eberly Center Website (opens in new window)
- Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University. Active Learning Strategies for Online Courses. Available at: Eberly Center Website (opens in new window)
- Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching. Active Learning. Available at: Active Learning PDF (opens in new window)
- Dawson, C. (2016). 100 Activities for Teaching Research Methods. Sage.
- Espey, M. (2018). Enhancing critical thinking using team-based learning. Higher Education Research & Development, 37(1), 15-29. Link (opens in new window) [doi.org]
- Laverie, D. A., Madhavaram, S., & McDonald, R. E. (2008). Developing a learning orientation: The role of team-based active learning. Marketing Education Review, 18(3), 37-51. Link (opens in new window) [doi.org]
- Michaelsen, L. K. (1992). Team learning: A comprehensive approach for harnessing the power of small groups in higher education. To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, 11(1), 107-122. Link (opens in new window) [doi.org]
- Parker, A., & Goldrick-Jones, A. (2011). A code of ethics as a collaborative learning tool: Comparing a face-to-face engineering team and multidisciplinary online teams. In D. Starke-Meyerring, A. Paré, N. Artemeva, M. Horne, & L. Yousoubova (Eds.), Writing in Knowledge Societies (pp. 299-320). The WAC Clearinghouse. Link (opens in new window) [doi.org]
Use of AI in Section Development
This section was developed using a combination of existing research, expert-informed insights, and AI-assisted drafting. ChatGPT (OpenAI) was used to:
- Synthesize best practices for active learning strategies into a cohesive and accessible guide for instructors.
- Clarify approaches that promote student engagement, participation, and deeper learning.
- Enhance readability and coherence, ensuring that active learning techniques are both research-based and practically applicable in face-to-face and online classrooms.
While AI-assisted drafting provided a structured foundation, all final content was reviewed, revised, and contextualized to ensure accuracy, alignment with research, and pedagogical effectiveness. This section remains grounded in institutional best practices and respects Creative Commons licensing where applicable.