1. Active teaching and learning workshop
Dr Timos Almpanis & Dr Danielle Tran
Senior Lecturers in Teaching, Learning & Professional Development (EDU)

2. Aims of this workshop
To reflect upon our current teaching strategies – how do we engage students?
To consider a few active teaching strategies and try them out together!
To link practice with educational theory and Bloom’s taxonomy

3. Active learning/teaching
‘Active learning is an approach based on activities that encourage students to take an active, engaged part in the learning process. This is in contrast to more traditional methods of teaching such as a lecturer trying to ‘transmit’ knowledge to students as they sit and listen’.
(UCL, 2017,

4. 5 min warm-up task How do you engage students when teaching a class?
Why do you use this method?

5. Voting (& electronic voting)

6. Peer Instruction
Discuss your response with a colleague and then vote again

7. The peer instruction process (Image from https://dbctle. erau

8. Active learning methods game adapted from Geoff Petty
Working in groups, decide on the best and the worst methods from the point of view of effective learning and create a pyramid putting the most effective method on top.

9. Bloom’s taxonomy Image source: https://cft. vanderbilt

10. Re-do the activity in light of the Bloom taxonomy
Re-do the activity in light of the Bloom taxonomy. Would you change anything?
Working in groups, decide on the best and the worst methods from the point of view of effective learning and create a pyramid putting the most effective method on top.

11. Activity Debriefing
Discuss your top three options taking into account:
a) Your own context b) The level of the students
Which activities would be more suitable for group work?
Which activities could be done in pairs?

12. Active Learning aligns with Constructivism
Learners as active seekers of knowledge in their attempt to create meaning
Teachers become facilitators of the learning process
Learning is socially constructed

13. Constructivist approaches
© Can Stock Photo / Andres
Problem solving and collaborative learning are commonly used

14. Constructivist approaches
© Can Stock Photo / iqoncept
Tasks are situated in real-world scenarios (Contextual & Situated learning)

15. Further Resources
Active Learning by Geoff Petty
Peer Instruction: Using pairs to engage all students
Using peer instruction to flip your classroom classroom-highlights-from-eric-mazurs-recent-visit/

16. Questions?