The evidence is compelling: active learning strategies significantly enhance postsecondary student engagement, learning outcomes, and overall academic achievement. A landmark meta-analysis featured in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences underscored this point, revealing a 6% average improvement in student exam scores when active learning methodologies were employed. Furthermore, students in traditional lecture-based classes were 1.5 times more likely to experience failure compared to their peers engaged in interactive learning environments.
Are you motivated to transition to more dynamic teaching approaches but seeking practical starting points? Or perhaps you’re a seasoned educator already utilizing active learning yet desire fresh, effective techniques applicable to modern learning landscapes like hybrid and HyFlex models? Whether your courses are delivered in person, online, or a blend of both, explore these 15 impactful Learning Activities designed to invigorate your teaching and empower your students this semester.
1. Think-Pair-Repair: Refine and Reinforce Ideas
Building upon the popular think-pair-share strategy, think-pair-repair challenges students to not just generate an initial answer but to iteratively refine it through collaboration. Begin by posing an open-ended question to your class, prompting each student to formulate their individual best response. Next, pair students and task them with reaching a consensus on a single, improved answer. Subsequently, merge two pairs into groups of four, requiring them to repeat the process and agree on a collective response. Continue merging groups until half the class is pitted against the other half, fostering robust discussion and collaborative problem-solving. For online or hybrid settings, utilize breakout rooms in platforms like Zoom to seamlessly replicate this activity virtually.
2. Improv Games: Inject Energy and Spontaneity
If your classroom atmosphere tends towards silence, regardless of your efforts to stimulate participation, consider incorporating low-pressure improv games to break the ice and foster a more engaging environment. The “three things in common” game is an excellent starting point. Pair students and challenge them to identify unexpected commonalities. This can be adapted for online breakout rooms as well. Alternatively, the “count to 20” challenge encourages group coordination and communication. Students collectively attempt to count to 20, with each number spoken by a different person, without pre-assigning numbers. If two individuals speak simultaneously, the count restarts at one. For hybrid classrooms implementing this activity, ensure comprehensive microphone coverage to capture voices from all participants effectively.
3. Brainwriting: Cultivating Individual and Collective Creativity
While brainstorming is a familiar technique, brainwriting offers a structured approach to idea generation that minimizes groupthink and maximizes individual contributions. In brainwriting, students initially dedicate time to generating ideas independently before sharing them aloud or posting them on a shared digital platform like a whiteboard. This period of individual reflection encourages deeper thinking and a wider range of perspectives, ultimately leading to more innovative and diverse ideas compared to traditional brainstorming sessions.
4. Jigsaw: Fostering Peer Teaching and Accountability
The jigsaw method is a powerful learning activity that promotes peer teaching and shared responsibility for understanding complex topics. Begin by dividing your class into “home groups” of four or five students each. Breakout rooms in virtual platforms facilitate this grouping even in hybrid learning environments. Assign each member of the home group a unique subtopic related to the main learning objective. Students then “regroup” with counterparts from other home groups who are exploring the same subtopic, forming “expert groups.” Within these expert groups, students collaborate to deepen their understanding of their assigned subtopic. Once mastery is achieved, students return to their home groups and take on the role of teachers, sharing their newly acquired expertise with their home group members, ensuring everyone gains a comprehensive understanding of the complete topic.
5. Concept Mapping: Visualizing Connections and Relationships
Collaborative concept mapping is a highly effective visual learning activity that helps students move beyond linear thinking and explore the interconnectedness of ideas. Groups of students work together to visually represent the relationships between different concepts, terms, or ideas related to a specific topic. This activity can be used to review previously learned material, plan projects, or brainstorm solutions to problems. Concept maps can be created using physical materials like sticky notes and chart paper in a classroom setting, or through digital collaborative tools for online or hybrid learning environments, allowing students to collectively map out connections and build a shared understanding.
6. The One-Minute Paper: Capturing Key Takeaways and Questions
The one-minute paper is a concise yet powerful activity for promoting student reflection and providing instructors with immediate feedback on student learning. At the end of a class session, set a timer for one minute and ask students to quickly write down either the most significant insight they gained during the class or the most pressing question that remains unanswered. This brief writing exercise encourages students to actively process the material covered, strengthens their writing skills, and offers you valuable insights into their comprehension and any areas of confusion. Utilize varied prompts to tailor this activity to different learning objectives and encourage diverse student responses.
7. Real-Time Reactions: Encouraging Active Engagement with Content
To enhance student engagement during passive learning activities like watching videos, mini-lectures, or peer presentations, incorporate real-time reactions. As students consume the content, encourage them to share their immediate thoughts, questions, and reactions in real-time. This fosters active participation even during content delivery and allows students to observe emerging trends in their classmates’ responses and consider diverse perspectives. This can be facilitated using a shared online document where everyone can contribute simultaneously, or simply leveraging the chat function within your video conferencing platform for a more informal and immediate exchange.
8. Chain Notes: Building Comprehensive Understanding Through Collaboration
Chain notes is a dynamic activity that leverages sequential contributions to build a more complete and multifaceted understanding of a topic. Prepare several questions related to the learning material, each written on a separate piece of paper. Distribute one question to each student. The first student writes a brief response to their assigned question within a set time limit and then passes the paper to the next student. Each subsequent student adds their own response, building upon previous contributions. This iterative process of adding responses from multiple perspectives results in a richer and more comprehensive understanding of each question. A digital adaptation involves using shared documents that multiple students can edit collaboratively, allowing for simultaneous contributions and easy review of the collective responses to identify patterns and any gaps in understanding.
9. Idea Lineup: Visually Representing Diverse Perspectives
The idea lineup activity is an engaging way to explore a question or topic with a spectrum of possible responses and visually represent the distribution of student viewpoints. Choose a question that elicits a range of opinions or stances. Ask students to physically position themselves along a designated line in the classroom, representing their position on the spectrum of answers. Students at one end of the line represent one extreme viewpoint, while students at the opposite end represent the opposing extreme, with those in between representing intermediate positions. In a hybrid classroom, this can be adapted using a virtual number line or a shared digital space where students can place their virtual markers to indicate their stance.
10. Mystery Quotation: Applying Knowledge and Critical Thinking
Challenge students to apply their understanding of a specific issue, concept, or theoretical position through the mystery quotation activity. After students have explored a particular topic, present them with a quotation related to that topic that they have not encountered before. Their task is to analyze the quotation and deduce the perspective or viewpoint of the person who stated it, justifying their interpretation to the class. Students can initially work in small breakout groups to debate their interpretations and formulate their justifications before engaging in a whole-class discussion to share their analyses and engage in deeper critical thinking about the quotation and its implications.
11. Idea Speed Dating: Sharpening Presentation Skills and Expanding Perspectives
Idea speed dating is a fast-paced and interactive activity that provides students with multiple opportunities to articulate their ideas, refine their presentation skills, and gain diverse perspectives from their peers. Students rotate through a designated space, either physically in the classroom or virtually through breakout rooms, engaging in brief, focused “speed dates” with different classmates. During each speed date, students share their insights on a specific topic, present elevator pitches for upcoming projects, or discuss their learning progress. The repetition of presenting their ideas to multiple partners in quick succession helps students hone their communication skills, solidify their understanding, and broaden their perspectives through exposure to the ideas of others.
12. Peer Review: Developing Critical Evaluation and Feedback Skills
Peer review, a cornerstone of academic practice, is a valuable learning activity to introduce to students early in their academic journeys. Have students exchange drafts of their written work, such as essays, proposals, or lab reports, with their peers. Instruct them to provide constructive feedback to each other, focusing on specific aspects of the work based on clear guidelines or rubrics. For instance, students can be tasked with identifying compelling arguments, pointing out unanswered questions, or highlighting logical inconsistencies in their peers’ drafts. This process not only improves the quality of student work through feedback but also develops their critical evaluation skills and their ability to provide and receive constructive criticism.
13. Quescussion: Stimulating Inquiry-Based Learning Through Questions
Quescussion, a playful twist on traditional class discussion, transforms the learning environment into an inquiry-driven space. Inspired by the format of Jeopardy, Quescussion imposes a unique rule: only questions are permitted during the discussion. If a student inadvertently makes a statement instead of posing a question, classmates can call out “Statement!” to gently correct them and refocus the discussion back to inquiry. Playing Quescussion at the beginning of a course can be particularly beneficial, as the questions generated by students can help shape the direction and content of subsequent lessons, making the course more responsive to student interests and learning needs. In hybrid learning settings, ensure that remote learners have equal opportunity to participate and that the audio system effectively captures all student voices for inclusive participation.
14. Sketchnoting: Visualizing Learning and Enhancing Retention
Instead of relying solely on traditional linear note-taking, encourage students to engage in sketchnoting during class. Sketchnoting involves creating visual notes that combine drawings, symbols, keywords, and connectors to represent the key concepts and relationships learned during a lesson. Emphasize that artistic skill is not the focus; the value of sketchnoting lies in how the act of visually representing information prompts students to process their understanding in a different way, visualize connections, and approach their learning from a fresh perspective. This visual approach can enhance memory retention and cater to diverse learning styles.
15. Empathy Mapping: Deepening Understanding Through Perspective-Taking
Borrowing a technique from design thinking, empathy mapping encourages students to explore a topic more deeply by actively adopting and analyzing a specific perspective. The process is deceptively simple yet profoundly insightful. Students create an empathy map by systematically considering what a particular person or stakeholder says, thinks, does, and feels in relation to the topic under study. This structured approach to perspective-taking is valuable in various academic contexts. In design thinking, empathy maps are used to create user-centered products. However, in education, this technique can be equally effective for analyzing characters in literature, understanding historical figures, or dissecting complex political stances, fostering deeper analytical and critical thinking skills.
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Editor’s note: This post was originally published August 2018 and has been updated.
