27 Active Learning Introduction

Section Goals

This session is an entry point designed to help you learn more about active learning and develop active learning concepts that you can integrate into your own teaching and learning. The materials here are intended to be useful to learners of every level of familiarity with active learning concepts, from the completely uninitiated to the expert. You’ll find fundamental introductory resources and materials, as well as several outward pointing references to optional supplementary and more advanced materials.

While we’ll have specific objectives for each chapter in this section, our overall learning objectives for this section of the text are to help each participant successfully do the following:

• Identify relevant methods, pedagogical approaches, and models for active learning in higher education
• Analyze learning spaces and their utility for active learning
• Demonstrate the ability to revise and improve existing course activities and assignments to increase their active learning potential
• Design a scaffolded sequence of activities that utilize means-tested active learning processes for a course you teach or would like to teach