Tag: active learning

Today I am excited to share a guest post Sarah Ruth Schmid, PhD student in geodidactics at the University of Oslo, in preparation of an iEarth journal club. Here it goes:

This is one of these texts that I wish I had known earlier: to give to students to help them understand their learning, but also to teachers as a super easy introduction to how to think about difficulties in learning: “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance […]

Very intrigued by that title, especially since I just wrote about student engagement as something positive, that all universities claim to want! Gourlay (2015) describes that traditionally, student engagement is described as behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement with a learning situation (and possibly beyond), other people in the context, and the content — often set […]

Why is it that even though most people agree (and most university policies state) that active student engagement is desirable, there are still large lecture theatres being built? Loughlin (2025) explores the “theory of action”, which distinguishes between what people or organisations say they do (for example in mission statements or policies; “espoused theory”) and […]

In this article, we investigate students’ experiences with active learning at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen, Norway (where we have put a lot of effort recently into introducing co-creation).

Ramp & Hummels (2025) describe the peer-consultation method “carousel“, “a method to facilitate the exchange of perspectives of different actors working in parallel on different challenges“: Each presenter gets 30 minutes to present a project and ask 2-4 peers for input and feedback.

Having just written about desirable difficulties yesterday, this Schwerter et al. (2025) article on “Differential use and effectiveness of practice testing: Who benefits and who engages?” fits the theme perfectly.

The STEM Education Research Centre at the University of Bergen had a really interesting presentation today (and the sketchy internet connection was more than made up for by all the kind people in the room that started streaming it from different angles!): Louis Deslauriers on “The Illusion of Learning, What to Do About It, and […]

In preparation for this fall’s online course on “Teaching for Sustainability“, I was looking into what kind of methods I want to model. And then — perfect timing — I started reading of Noah (2025)’s brilliant book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” […]

As you saw in my recent post on the first draft of my “teaching consultations menu”, I found a really awesome book on “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality: A Guide to Crafting Engaging Professional Learning Experiences in Higher Education” by Noah (2025). Before I show you how I applied the book to a course […]

I haven’t read a lot of physics education research recently, but this article on how “Physics instructors’ knowledge and use of active learning has increased over the last decade but most still lecture too much” caught my eye.

Teaching for sustainability is about so much more than teaching the content and skills described in the SDGs, or even the cross-cutting sustainability competencies. Today, I talked with teachers who asked what they could do in their courses where the curriculum does not mention anything related to sustainability, and if they should even do anything. […]

I’m back to browsing the “menu” in my new favorite book, “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022). If you haven’t read the first blog post about the book, you might want to read that one first for context.

I found a new YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK!!!-book: “The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain” by Zakrajsek (2022). It is aimed at students and it  might be the most important thing students ever read in school…

This is the third part (part 1 here, part 2 here) of my notes on reading “small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes” by Darby & Lang (2019). Take it with a pinch of salt and go read the original book! These are just my two cents on the points that I find […]

This is the second part (part 1 here) of my notes on reading “small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes” by Darby & Lang (2019). Take it with a pinch of salt and go read the original book! These are just my two cents on the points that I find especially relevant […]

I absolutely loved reading the “small teaching” book by Lang (2021), so I was super excited to dig into the related “small teaching online — applying learning science in online classes” by Darby & Lang (2019), and it did not disappoint! I loved it (my only complaint: why didn’t they call it “Tiny Teaching”??? What […]

A great teaching method that engages students with literature, and that Cathy Bovill recently introduced me to, are “doughnut rounds”: Students (or workshop participants) are asked to read an article and formulate a certain number of questions, that are then discussed in groups. This leads to people being able to fill in gaps in their […]

‘Active Learning’ is frequently used in relation to university teaching, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects where expository lecturing is still a common means of instruction, especially in theoretical courses. However, many different activities and types of activities can be assigned this label. This review article examines the educational research and development […]

I’m currently leading another virtual 3-day workshop on “introduction to university teaching”, and yesterday I left a prompt on the shared slide deck we are working on, “Things I wanted to say but didn’t get the chance…”, for participants to react to when they gave me the continue, start, stop feedback on that day. As I […]

This summer I had a fun little side project: I was co-supervising a Bachelor thesis in geography at Kiel University! Janina Dreeßen, with Katja Kuhwald as her main supervisor, did an excellent job, and I am presenting her work at the #FieldWorkFix conference today. If you can’t join later, here are my slides and what […]

I’m still inspired by Cathy’s work on “co-creation”, and an episode of “Lecture Breakers” (I think the first one on student engagement techniques where they talked about letting students choose the format of the artefact they do for assessment purposes; but I binge-listened, and honestly, they are all inspiring!). And something that Sam recently said […]

Kjersti and I have been talking about asking students to take turns and write summaries of lectures throughout the whole semester. We would then give feedback on them to make sure we get a final result that is correct (and that the student learns something, obviously). The summaries are then collected into a booklet that […]

I was reading an article on “active learning” by Lombardi et al. (2021), when the sentence “In undergraduate geoscience, Pugh et al. (2019) found that students who made observations of the world and recognized how they might be explained by concepts from their classes were more likely to stay in their major than those who […]

I often teach faculty development workshops at Kiel University. Since we have been in remote teaching mode almost exclusively since March 2020, dealing with virtual classes is a pressing subject – both for the faculty who attend my workshops, but also for myself as I have to present best practice examples of leading fully-virtual all-day […]

In a workshop I led recently, a participant helped me gain a new perspective on an old method: the “lightning storm in the chat” (my best attempt at translating “Chatgewitter” to English. No idea what the name of the method is in English). The idea is simple: You ask a question, people type their responses […]

I have always hated workshops where you had to do “active stuff”, moving around to music and the like, because the facilitator wanted to “get everybody active!”. But recently I’ve come to appreciate the value in that (better late than never, right?). So what I occasionally do these days, sometimes after a break or when […]

Several things happened today. I had a lovely time reading in the hammock I tried to kill two birds with one stone (figuratively of course): writing a blog post about the book I read (which I really loved) and try a new-to-me format of Instagram posts: A caroussel, where one post slides into the next […]

If you’ve been trying to actively engage students in your classes, I am sure you’ve felt at least some level of resistance. Even though we know from literature (e.g. Freeman et al., 2014) that active learning increases student performance, it’s sometimes difficult to convince students that we are asking them to do all the activities […]

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that how you behave as an instructor influences how your students work during peer instruction phases. But do you know what you can do to make sure that student discussions are reaching the level of critical thinking that you want? I.e., how do you construct classroom […]

This is a method that I have been excited about ever since learning about #birdclass in the “Evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching” MOOC last year: Help students discover that the content of your class is not restricted to your class, but actually occurs everywhere! All the time! In their own lives! The idea is that students take […]

I am reading the “Faculty Focus” mailing list, and a side-note in one of their recent posts, “Why policies fail to promote better learning decisions” by Lolita Paff, really struck a chord with me. The article is about how to modify policies (like no screens! compulsory attendance! etc) to help students understand why behaving in […]

As you know, I’m preparing a workshop for teaching assistants in mechanical engineering at Dresden University of Technology. And even though I’ve given similar workshops successfully more than once before, it somehow happened that I changed my plan a bit here, and then changed a bit there, and am now constructing the whole workshop from scratch. […]

As I mentioned a while back, we are preparing a flipped course. And the biggest question always is how to make sure students actually prepare for class. Because if they weren’t prepared, what would you do? Repeat the content they should have read about at home and bore the few students who actually did the […]

I really like hydrostatics. Of course I like moving water even better, but even static water is great. And there are so many things to explore! If I was to teach hydrostatics any time soon, there are so many little teasers I would use. For example this one: A sailor is standing on the bottom […]

Make sure it stays silent during the first step of the clicker process. When using clickers in class, there are many different possible ways of implementing clicker questions and peer instruction, for example the Mazur sequence (which is our default sequence) and the Physics Education Research Group at UMass (PERG) sequence. Let’s recall: The Mazur […]

Can we become “too motivating”? One thing I’ve been pondering recently are vicious circles, especially in teaching and learning contexts. Imagine this situation: You observe that your students are not as active as you would like them to be. Hence you change something in your teaching to make them become more active: You act more […]

PBL – the final steps. Two weeks ago, I described the first five steps of the problem-based learning (PBL) method. Last week, we continued with the workshop and went through the final steps. Step 6, the research phase, was completed over the week between the two workshops: Everybody worked on questions related to observing the […]

Workshop on PBL, using the upcoming solar eclipse (on Friday!) as a case study. I am currently attending a workshop run by one of my all-time favorite colleagues, Marisa, on Problem-Based Learning. The workshop is aimed at people who want to use PBL in their teaching, and is split into three sessions. By pure dumb luck I realized […]

A simple visualization of two types of waves. The FIFA world cup has been over for a while now, but I still need to share an idea I had watching one of the games when the audience got bored and started doing a wave around the stadion: this would be a great in-class demonstration of […]

Showing demonstrations might not be as effective as you think. Since I was talking about the figures I bring with me to consultations yesterday, I thought I’d share another one with you. This one is about the effectiveness of showing demonstrations in the classroom. As you might have noticed following this blog, I’m all for […]

Article by Freeman et al., 2014, “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics”. Following up on the difficulties in asking good questions described yesterday, I’m today presenting an article on the topic “should we ask or should we tell?”. Spoiler alert – the title says it all: “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, […]

How do you ask questions that really make students think, and ultimately understand? I’ve only been working at a center for teaching and learning for half a year, but still my thinking about teaching has completely transformed, and still is transforming. Which is actually really exciting! :-) This morning, prompted by Maryellen Weimer’s post on […]

Remember my ABCD voting cards? Here is how the professionals do audience response. Remember my post on ABCD voting cards (post 1, 2, 3 on the topic)? I then introduced them as “low tech clickers”. Having never worked with actual clickers then, I really really liked the method. And I still think it’s a neat […]

How do you introduce voting cards as a new method in a way that minimizes student resistance? As all new methods, voting cards (see post on the method here, and on what kind of questions to ask here) first seem scary. After all, students don’t know what will happen if they happen to chose the wrong […]

Different ways of posing questions for concept tests are being presented here Concept tests using voting cards have been presented in this post. Here, I want to talk about different types of questions that one could imagine using for this method. 1) Classical multiple choice In the classical multiple choice version, for each question four […]

Voting cards. A low-tech concept test tool, enhancing student engagement and participation. (Post 1/3) Voting cards are a tool that I learned about from Al Trujillo at the workshop “teaching oceanography” in San Francisco in 2013. Basically, voting cards are a low-tech clicker version: A sheet of paper is divided into four quarters, each quarter […]