Tips for Teachers: Active Learning and Student Engagement
Welcome to our archive of tips on active learning and student engagement to enhance your classroom experience!
Many of the tips discussed below are from the card set “Active Learning in the Classroom”. The set is designed for new, as well as experienced, teachers. As many as 30 different techniques are covered to suit a particular didactic purpose. Whether you want to teach students how to discuss or collaborate or have them solve problems, there is a wide range of inspiring and educational activities. Browse the set and decide which activities to use during your classes: you can download the PDF version here or visit the TLC headquarters (REC C0.03) during walk-in hours to get a hard copy.
LEGO Serious Play in class |
The Jigsaw Method |
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| Did you know that you can use LEGO in your courses? It’s called LEGO Serious Play and it is intended to build concepts, collaboration and processes. Instead of letting students merely discuss a topic, you can ask them to visualize it with LEGO. In an episode of The Learning Curve Fam and Sharon discuss the use of LEGO Serious Play in higher education with Ruth-Martine Huijs, trainer at TLC-FMG. The TLC-FMG also hosts LEGO Serious Play workshops to provide you with a hands-on introduction to this teaching method. | The Jigsaw method sparks dynamic collaboration by turning students into experts on different sub-topics. In specialization groups, they master and plan how to teach their sub-topic. Then, in mixed groups, they share their knowledge, creating an engaging peer-learning experience where everyone contributes to the overall understanding. Find out more about the Jigsaw method on | |||||
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Feedback Loop |
Open Questions |
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| Conduct quick in-class polls or quizzes to gauge students’ understanding in real-time. Use tools such as Wooclap, online forms, or hand-raising to gather immediate responses on specific questions or concepts. After collecting the responses, review and discuss the results openly with the class. Highlight key areas for improvement, and provide clarity on topics where confusion arose. Don’t forget to follow-up with a second round of questions to determine whether understanding has improved. This approach fosters an interactive learning environment, encouraging students to engage actively in the lesson. Additionally, it creates a continuous feedback loop. This gives you, but most importantly, the students insight in where they are at in terms of reaching the learning goals (and thus identify potential gaps) and fosters students’ learning process. | Students learn by doing. One way of activating them is by asking open-ended questions. Don’t answer those questions for them, but give them some time to come up with an answer and share it with the group. You can combine this with a think-share-pair method in which students first think about the answer, then share this with their neighbour and lastly share it with the group. | |||||
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Connecting the abstract to the concrete |
Take Aways |
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| Presenting information in the abstract can sometimes lead to a disconnect or lack of engagement. As you cover a particular theory or concept, introduce a case study that demonstrates its application or challenges associated with it. You can even use videos, podcasts, or other media that showcase real-world situations. After presenting a case, pose open-ended questions to stimulate critical thinking. For instance: “Given what we’ve learned, how might you have approached this situation differently?” or “What do you think were the key factors that led to this outcome?” | Want to know what’s clicking with your students? After a busy class, take five minutes. Ask them to write down the biggest thing they learned or noticed that day – anything from the lesson counts. Do it for yourself too. Later, look over their notes and share some in the next class. It’s a simple way to see what’s working, spark new discussions, and make sure you’re on the same page. Give it a shot and see the difference! | |||||
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Switch methods |
Think-Pair-Share |
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| Switching up your teaching methods regularly will keep students interested and involved. Our advice is to not lecture for more than 20 minutes straight. Use group activities, questions, discussions, and videos to activate your students. | How can you activate at least 50% of the students in your class, instead of only the usual suspects? Use the think-pair-share method! You pose a (not too easy) question, give students (half a) minute time to think about an answer (THINK), then let them discuss their answers with a student next to them (PAIR). Give them a few minutes to do so, depending on the complexity of the question you asked. Students get feedback on their initial thoughts and analyse the question/problem with another student. Finally, ask students to share their anwer/ideas with the group, or with a small group of other students (SHARE) and start a follow-up discussion. This activity works in both tutorial groups and lectures. | |||||
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Cliffhanger Lecturing |
Show them how it’s not done |
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| Rather than making each topic fit neatly within one day’s class period, intentionally structure topics to end three-fourths of the way through the time, leaving one quarter of the time to start the next module/topic. This generates an automatic bridge between sessions and better meets learning science principles of the spacing effect and interleaving topics. | The use of good examples, e.g., of an assignment, assumes that students can learn from them how to perform tasks correctly. However, it can be challenging for students to identify what is good about them or apply them effectively. To address this, instead show students the wrong example. This helps them not only to learn the correct application of certain principles but also to recognize mistakes. After all, students should not only know how to do something correctly, but also recognizing when it is done incorrectly. | |||||
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An image is worth a thousand words |
Chunk your lectures |
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| You can use this learning activity to activate your students at home and in class. Ask students to find an image related to the topic you want to discuss in the next meeting. Students share the image with you before class so that you can present them during the meeting. Let students first brainstorm in pairs what themes, common patterns, missing links they find. Then discuss this plenary and provide a clear take-home message. | Long lectures can be hard to follow. Try breaking your class into shorter, focused segments with activities in between. An ideal time for a segment is 15-20 minutes. You could, for example, have mini-breaks in which students can ask questions, activate students with quiz questions, or continue teaching but in a different way (e.g., by applying the subject matter to real world examples). Breaking up the lecture in segments allows students to digest information, ask questions, and stay engaged. Think of it like episodes in a series, making each one count! | |||||
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Course syllabus annotation |
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| As you begin a course, asking students to annotate the syllabus (note questions they have, topics they’re particularly excited about, clarifications they’d like) can be a useful way to ensure they’ve read the document and are aware of what’s coming up. And as you end a course, asking students to revisit the syllabus and point out readings they particuarly liked (or not), assignments that were particularly effective (or not), etc. can be a useful way to get detailed feedback on the structure & content of your course. Both of these would work better in smaller rather than larger classes, of course, but it’s an interesting idea and you can even use a common tool to do this in a shared space where others can also see the comments/questions and provide feedback. A bit scary but also potentially really useful with the right group of students! |
More coming soon… |
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