3 Back-to-School Active Learning Strategies
Today, I had the pleasure of guest speaking at IUB’s New Faculty Orientation on active learning in small- to medium-sized courses.
Active learning isn’t a fad or a buzzword: it’s the research-backed fuel that powers my classroom. Active learning is all about creating opportunities for students to engage with course material in hands-on, collaborative, transferable, and reflective ways.
I love the way the session’s facilitator Leslie Drane describes active learning:
“When we lecture at students, they are not very involved in the learning process. But with active learning we involve students directly in their learning. We can encourage them to think critically, practice skills, collaborate with others, and apply the knowledge. Consider the difference between watching the Great British Baking Show (lecture) and getting in the kitchen and making a three-layered cake (active learning).”
This is the third year I’ve presented at NFO and had the opportunity to chat with new faculty about my favorite active learning exercises.
As we gear up for school to start, I want to share three ideas from today’s session and from my classroom that might help you with your lesson planning this semester.
Three Strategies To Try
#1 - Get Sticky with It
Anyone who’s been in my office knows I have an almost comically large collection of sticky notes (arranged by color, size, and shape, of course). While I love digital tools like Canva, Adobe Express, and Padlet for sparking creativity and collaboration, sometimes you can’t beat old-fashioned chart paper, markers, and Post-its. Students appreciate the break from their screens and a chance to get up and move.
In my classes, these analog tools help create the conditions for the collaborative discussion of challenging course texts and concepts. I’ll post large sheets of chart paper around the room, each with a different prompt or question. Students are then divided into small, color-coded groups (each with their own sticky note and marker color), and they circulate the room (sometimes freely, sometimes in timed rounds), responding thoughtfully to each prompt and the peer responses that came before them.
Scenes from a discussion of The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections by Ben Wildavsky. I simply numbered the canvases for each of the eight career arts, and let my students take the lead on summarizing and unpacking each one.
The magic happens as layers of conversation build: students read and respond to previous groups’ notes, rearranging them, adding arrows or highlights, even sketching illustrations. By the end, the chart paper becomes a visible record of evolving ideas, or a map of my students’ collective thinking and debates.
This strategy works especially well early in the semester or when discussing challenging topics. It provides every student with an opportunity to contribute without having to speak in front of the entire class, which is especially important for timid first-year students, helping them build confidence in sharing their ideas. As I circulate, I join in the dialogue using my own distinct sticky notes—often a unique color or shape—to pose follow-up questions and push the conversation deeper.
#2 - From Text to Image
Time for a digital tool spotlight, where creativity meets comprehension! Students can use digital tools like Adobe Express to distill and remediate the main ideas from a course reading into an image for social media. This activity is a great conversation starter, and it allows you to check your students’ reading comprehension in a more engaging way. This is also the in-class activity I use to introduce my students to creating with Adobe Express, a tool most of them have not used before.
#3 - Mind Your Audience
An active learning session isn’t an active learning session without some active learning (say that three times fast). As part of today’s session, faculty participated in an active learning block party, where they discussed and ranked various active learning strategies. The active learning strategy that got the most attention was an audience translation exercise, where a lecture is paused and students reframe or translate the concepts for a specific audience. This is an excellent strategy for ensuring that students comprehend the content, are progressing to higher-order levels of thinking, and are aware of the needs, expectations, and background knowledge of diverse audiences. This emphasis on audience awareness is not unlike my From Text to Image strategy, where students have to think about how to translate academic content to social media.
And, if you’re curious, the lowest-ranked active learning activity was the Pause Procedure: stopping a lecture to give students time to trade, compare, and discuss their notes. There was some skepticism that the notes might not be distinct enough to add significant value and be a worthwhile use of class time. However, in a humanities seminar where we put different texts and theories in conversation and create constellations of ideas and authors, this has more value.
Gather Evidence of Student Learning
What I always stress to faculty during these sessions is that active learning can produce powerful artifacts of student learning. Don’t wait until you need evidence of your teaching for review or promotion to start gathering it! Be proactive. Collect data, examples, and photos of your students at work (with their permission, of course!), and reflect on your findings.
For instance, whenever I bring out the chart paper and markers, I take pictures of the canvases my students have created. When I run my version of the crowd crumple activity, I collect the discussion questions they generate and create or update my question bank for the associated course text or concept. When you create an archive of students’ engagement with course content, you can then start to notice patterns in their responses. I make note of how students’ language is evolving in the way they discuss course texts or pose questions. It’s interesting to compare, for example, the questions students asked about a course concept in 2020 with those in 2025.
Want to Learn More?
Click here to visit my post talking about last year’s NFO Active Learning session.
Click here to read Leslie Drane’s Center for Innovative Teaching & Learning blog post. She included my take on the crowd crumple exercise as well as additional resources.
As always, thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of my content or have ideas for collaboration, please contact me at gabrielle@gabriellestecher.com.
