Facilitate active learning

Including active learning strategies can be as simple as posing the right questions and giving students time to reflect and respond, or it may shape the structure of an entire lesson or unit of learning. How you deliver this content is an important consideration when planning an engaging and successful active learning task.

The size and nature of the learning environment you’re in (synchronous or asynchronous) are also important considerations when facilitating active learning. Below are some strategies you can consider when planning and facilitating active learning in synchronous environments.

Strategies for facilitating a synchronous class

Any type of learning that occurs in real-time at a scheduled event, whether online or in-person is considered synchronous. It’s important to reduce the amount of lengthy blocks of content when delivering presentations synchronously, and break it up at least every 7-15 minutes with different activities, as this keeps students actively engaged in the learning process (Lumpkin, 2017). This also provides opportunities to build community amongst your cohort.

The size of your synchronous class is important to consider, as some activities are easily scaled to factor in large numbers of students, whereas other more involved activities may be better utilised in smaller groups or only when you have enough Teaching Associates. In any situation, you will need to provide:

• clear and visible instructions
• ongoing guidance
• well structured tasks
• learning goals linked clearly at the beginning so the students see relevance.

Small class facilitation

Small group classes provide a more flexible environment for running activities that incorporate movement, interactivity and direct involvement by the teaching staff. Transition time when moving between activities or from instruction to task engagement is reduced, and students will be able to develop more positive working relationships and spend more time collaborating.

While synchronous learning environments lend themselves to developing positive social and emotional connection between students, they do not automatically generate this connectedness. It must be actively encouraged and built in by educators, which can take some advance planning.

Large class facilitation

Large classes can sometimes feel impersonal and difficult to engage students. However there are some key strategies that you could use to create a more personal, active and conversational feeling.

• Use your TAs to support the large class discussions and activities.
• Create peer-to-peer activities where students can discuss and support each other.
• Break up the session to have in-class discussions.
• Incorporate educational technologies that can help facilitate the class activities and discussions.
• Use warm-up activities or icebreakers to get students feeling comfortable working together.
• Incorporate some of the active learning strategies for some ideas of what might be appropriate for your classes.
• Consider using the 4 A’s to design these breaks in the content to build relevance.
• Adapt the timing of activities to take into account the transition times between activities and instruction.

View this article to learn more about some ways you can increase active learning in a large class.

Example breakdown of a 90 minute session

Below you can see an example of how you can break a 90 minute session up to include more active learning activities.

Recommendations for effective activities

Here are some recommendations for facilitating activities in a small or large classroom.

Facilitation plan example

The following recommendations are aimed to improve the student experience within an active learning class.