Active Learning Activities

Active Reading.

If you want to develop students’ reading or analysis skills, you could try setting a short piece of reading along with some prompt questions, to help students learn to read actively. In this way students are encouraged to pause and consider what they remember and understand from the text. To take this up a level, as well as increasing the length or complexity of the text, you could also try introducing different types of writing, as well as varying the questions to encourage criticality.
Prompt questions might include things for the students to consider before reading, while reading or after they have read the piece. When students get more practiced, you might ask them to give the piece a brief read, and then come up with their own questions, and read it again looking for answers. You could also combine this with a think-pair-share activity to get a class consensus on a piece.
Take a look at the reading support for students on the Skills Hub for more advice on reading skills.

Carousel.

Carousel (also sometimes called ‘rotating review’) is a great way for student groups to get feedback on their ideas or on resources they have created. It’s also a good way to use small group discussions to surface a range of ideas to share with the whole class.
This activity supports understanding because the students need to engage with all of the topics covered by all of the groups. It also gives the students opportunities to get lots of feedback on their own group’s ideas and gives them experience of providing constructive feedback to others.
Students work their way around designated ‘stops’ (tables, posters etc) in small groups. This short blog post from City University explains how it works and provides some references for more detail. For an example of introducing contemporary controversial subjects through a carousel see this article from the University of Sussex’s book, ‘100 ideas for active learning’.

Cleaning up the web.

Students often get a lot of their information from the internet – so why not give them some responsibility for the quality of these resources? After all, they are working to become the experts of the future…
This activity helps students to develop their understanding of where information comes from and how it is published. It also has the advantage of cleaning up some of the misinformation or ‘fake news’ that can be published online. This post from the University of Edinburgh explains the idea in more detail.
Reviewing and editing misinformation online could form a useful learning activity around a given topic, or it could become a wider project with a strong Social Impact theme! See Queen’s University Belfast’s Women in Red Editathon and the Wikipedia Games site from The University of Edinburgh as examples.

Concept mapping.

Concept mapping is a technique for representing and organising knowledge, and can be used by students to build learning and by tutors to plan teaching and assess learning.
Concepts maps focus on the relationships between concepts, and help students learn through basing new learning on their current knowledge. Concepts are placed in nodes (often, circles), and the relationships between them are indicated by labeled arrows connecting the concepts.

View the Technical Report by IHMC that provides more information and a tool to do online mapping. For practical guidance on the use of concept maps in the classroom take a look at this Prezi. There is also an example of using concept mapping to assess student learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

Do’s and Don’ts.

Bridging the gap between theory and practice can sometimes be a challenge. This activity asks students to think about the implications for practice in a simple and structured way, by creating a list of three Dos and three Don’ts when using the content or applying the ideas in practice. This activity can be done individually or in groups.

You can work this in both directions – either ask the students to start from the theory and come up with some ‘dos and dont’s’ for a practice situation or start with a provided scenario and ask them to analyse the decisions made and work back to the theory that informs them.

Envoys.

Similar to the Jigsaw technique, Envoys (Gershon, 2013) is a group work task that encourages peer learning. Each group is given an area of a topic to investigate, with associated questions to provide direction, and a set time in which to complete the task. Once completed, the group selects an envoy, whose role is to move to another group and teach them what they have discovered in the course of their investigations. This continues until all groups have been visited by all envoys and have captured the learning on all aspects of the task. This technique can also differentiate well, as topics can be assigned to groups according to the level of challenge needed.

Extension tasks.

An extension task is one which is added to the core activity of a session in order to stretch and challenge students who have completed the main activity. It is important that extension tasks require a different level of thinking or performance, not just more of the same, as they should encourage students to think more deeply about what they are studying. (Using Bloom’s Taxonomy can help with the design of these tasks.)
Gershon (2015) suggests the following examples, which could be used in a wide variety of subjects:

• a philosophically-informed or concept-led question relating to what is being studied, requiring students to think more deeply about the core concept/s of the topic.
• a question or task which requires students to evaluate or synthesise (higher-level skills) information relating to the topic, requiring more abstract thinking (you could provide a structure, such as a Haiku or limerick!)
• a task which must be completed in a short amount of time, in which decisions have to be made quickly and with reference to the topic being learned
• provide students with a mark scheme and ask them to self- or peer-assess, justify their judgement and identify, or even make, improvements

For more information and resources on differentiating teaching see this padlet – https://uon1.padlet.org/nicola_denning/differentiation-xjs6dv9k115u44ym

For more information and resources, view the padlet on Differentiating teaching.

Flip the first five minutes.

Consider opening your class with an active task to engage students and help them focus on the learning for the session. This article from Faculty Focus magazine suggests some possible tasks.
Of course, you can also look out for ‘flippable moments‘ throughout the class, too; flip the most confusing part by designing an activity for students to engage in and practise skills, rather than listen to an explanation; flip the ‘boring‘ part by posing a challenge, e.g. ‘design the worst example of…’ or ‘find all the mistakes in..’, reverse brainstorm.
More on Flipping the Classroom is available from the Vanderbilt University.

Jigsaw.

Using a jigsaw format basically means creating topic-based groups, where students become experts in one particular area of the topic, and then redistributing the students into mixed groups, where they are all responsible for teaching each other about their area of the topic. It’s great for bringing together different perspectives or positions, different periods in historical development, or different aspects of a complex problem.
This activity supports understanding because it requires each student in the topic group to ensure they have a good grasp of the topic – after all, at the next stage of the jigsaw, they may be the only expert on that element! It also supports synthesis, as the students have to bring all the pieces together to form a coherent whole in the second stage.
Sample lesson plan for a jigsaw session [PDF].

Keywords/ Co-created glossaries.

Share out the research on new topics or texts by creating (or asking students to help you create) a list of unfamiliar terms used. Then divide these up among the group and ask the students to define them in a given number of words. Students can share and discuss their definitions to reach a final set that everyone (including you!) is happy with.
This activity supports learning by encouraging students to research and compare definitions and then present them to others in their own words.
This could be a classroom or an online activity, collaborative tools like Padlet could be used to create a digital glossary that students can refer back to (or continue to add to) as they continue their studies.

Questioning with Blooms.

Using Blooms Taxonomy to structure the questions you use in the classroom is an efficient way to differentiate teaching so that all levels of readiness can be accommodated and appropriately challenged. Gershon (2013) suggests three approaches:

• when giving students a set of questions to work through, use the Taxonomy to ensure that they get progressively more challenging
• when asking questions in sessions, choose higher level questions to challenge able students, or lower order questions for students who need more support or confidence building
• when planning your sessions, break the time into smaller segments which each address a question; as the session progresses the questions can move up the taxonomy reflecting more complexity or abstractness.

To help apply Blooms Taxonomy view Question Stems for Each Level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
For more information and resources view the padlet on Differentiating teaching.

Simple session starters.

Why should you do all the hard work at the start of your teaching session? Consider these quick and simple session starters to focus students’ attention, provoke some thought around a (new) topic and set an early expectation that your students, not you, will be doing the work in the session.

• Photos/images – why am I showing this? which is the odd one out, and why? what connects these images? …
• Missing words – ever watched the satirical quiz show Have I got news for you? Display a statement with words blanked out and invite students to guess what’s missing. A carefully chosen statement can generate useful debate, assess understanding and challenge misconceptions.

Speed dating.

This activity is like an individual version of the carousel in that students have the opportunity to discuss their ideas one to one with a number of their peers.
The easiest way to set this up is to have students line up in two rows facing each other. After a set amount of time, one of the rows stays in place, while the students in the other row move along one place to speak to the next student. You might need to consider using a buzzer or similar to keep the lines moving – and it can get noisy!
This activity supports understanding because the students are effectively teaching each other about what they have learned. They have to summarise and convey their ideas clearly and succintly in a limited time, and they have the opportunity to get feedback from several of their peers, to repeatedly adjust or improve their ‘pitch’.

Think-Pair-Share.

This technique is useful for building confidence, for generating discussion in large groups, and for supporting students for whom English is not their first language.
It works in three steps: first, you give students some time individually to explore a topic and consolidate their own thinking; next, you ask them to explain or teach it to a partner; then finally you bring the pairs together to share their ideas in a larger group discussion.
This activity can support the development of understanding, as the students are expected to reframe an idea in their own words, justify their opinion, and consider other perspectives.
A blog post from King’s College London explains more about the benefits and implementation.

Using different lenses.

Analysing an idea or argument from an unfamiliar perspective can often be helpful in developing criticality and an appreciation of complexity, as well as building empathy. In this type of activity, students are asked to put themselves in someone else’s shoes, and present a given topic or concept from different perspectives.
There are lots of different ways to manage this – you could ask the whole class to review a topic from a series of given perspectives, or you could break the class into groups and ask each group to consider and then present a perspective. You might then ask them to try to justify that perspective, for example by placing groups in opposing corners of the classroom and asking them to convince other students to join their corner. Or you might create mixed groups to facilitate comparison and synthesis, in a similar way to the ‘jigsaw’ activity described above, or the ‘six thinking hats‘ model. You can also use this approach to ask students to review their own work individually.

Useful links and resources

https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/52etc – A toolkit for student engagement developed by Advance HE and consisting of 52 activities for use in face-to-face, online or blended environments.

https://openpress.sussex.ac.uk/ideasforactivelearning/ – a practical handbook created by Sussex University to inspire active teaching.

https://www.youtube.com/@digitallyenhancededucation554/playlists – Recordings from the Digitally Enhanced Education webinar series run by the University of Kent.

https://advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/framework-inclusive-learning-and-teaching – Framework for Inclusive Learning and Teaching.