When choosing active teaching and learning methods for your course, it’s wise to ask yourself this question: which activities will offer my students the opportunity to practice for the assessment and help them to achieve the learning objectives? As we saw in the video on Constructive Alignment: if we want our students to be able to select, analyse and design, the activities should offer them practice in selecting, analysing and designing.

Choosing the right activities is very course specific. However, in general we can give some guidelines on which activities match the different levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Please note that this overview is not complete, there are numerous other activities your students can do.

Level of thinking	Student activity
Remember	Information transfer, preferably through self study (flipped classroom): literature; video etc.
Understand	Asking and answering questions, thinking of examples; peer instruction etc.
Apply	Exercises; peer instruction; case study; lab work, etc.
Analyse	Case study; lab work; analysing graphs, data, articles, etc.
Evaluate	Evaluating graphs, data, articles etc. Discussions; debates.
Create	Design assignments, projects, etc.

There are three key stages in the active teaching and learning process:

1. Orientation

Informing students about the learning objectives, motivating students to take part in the activity, for example by making students see the relevance for their future study and career.

2. Active processing

The learning activity itself. Students are actively engaged with the content, which leads to knowledge construction.

3. Evaluation and feedback

Discussing the outcomes of the learning activity and providing feedback.

As we have already mentioned before, feedback is a vital aspect of active teaching and learning. It is however easily omitted bacause of lack of time. It is therefore very important to dedicate time for evaluation and feedback when planning your teaching.

What should evaluation and feedback consist of?

• Give students the opportunity to share their outcomes or answers. It’s not necessary that every single student or every group has their say. You can invite or appoint some students or groups to share their results, and ask others to indicate which of the given answers is most like their own.
• It’s not necessary to give feedback to every single student or group of students. You can ask one student or group to share their results and then ask ‘who has a different solution’, until you have seen most of the answers. When you give feedback to these shared answers, students who didn’t share, can still check their answers.
• Do not only provide the correct answer, but also tackle commonly made mistakes and explain why these are wrong.

We have been stressing the importance of active teaching and learning, but this doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to give pure lectures. However, there are some do’s and don’ts in lecturing.

Don’t

• Lecture the book from a to z.

There are at least two reasons why this is a bad idea:

When you’re telling students exactly what they can also read in a book you are not making the most of your contact time with the students.

Psychologist and educationalist Howard Gardner said it very well: ‘Coverage is the enemy of understanding’. When you want to cover in your lecture everything that you want your students to know, they will only grasp a bit of everything you have told them. It’s much more effective to focus on the key issues, and to make sure that students really understand those.

Do

• Paint the bigger picture, make connections. We often provide students with all the information, and expect that students will make the connections themselves. Making the connections, however, is the hard part you need to help them with.
• Illustrate the content by giving examples and relating it to real life events.
• Focus on the difficult issues. You’ll often know what students find difficult, but you can also ask them which topics they want you to discuss.
• Demonstrate how to tackle a problem, how to approach certain issues. Don’t (only) talk content, talk about what to do with the content, how to deal with the content