Active Learning Workshops
Active learning is not a new idea. The term was coined by Bonwell and Eison (1991), but the principles behind it appear much earlier in the work of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Dewey. It is a broad set of methods that put learners into the material through self-reflection, work with classmates, and exchange with the instructor, rather than leaving them to receive information passively.
The results are measurable. Interactive engagement produces higher conceptual understanding than traditional instruction (Hake, 1998), and across STEM and medical fields, students taught with active learning methods earn higher examination scores than students in lecture-based sections (Freeman et al., 2014).
These are working sessions, not presentations about teaching. Participants bring a session they currently teach and leave with a revised plan for it. Two of the offerings have a pre-work module that must be completed before the live meeting, because the working time is reserved for the redesign itself.
Sessions are open to faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate research assistants and graduate teaching assistants and any medical student or resident with an interest in teaching.
2026-2027 Workshops Series
Length of Time: 2 hours
Location: Hybrid
Description: A session delivered as a continuous presentation gives students no point at which to test what they understand, and it gives the faculty member no signal about what landed until the examination. In this studio, faculty revise a large group session they currently teach, with an instructional designer present, and leave with a revised plan.
Pre-Work: Active Learning at Scale, a self-paced module covering facilitation moves across in-person and remote modalities, presence, active learning strategies, and a diagnostic of current practice. It opens two weeks before each studio date and includes the Redesign Worksheet participants bring to the session.
Dates and Registration
Length of Time: 2 hours
Location: Hybrid
Description: Small group sessions are designed for discussion, but discussion often narrows to the same few students while the rest wait for the answer. This studio applies the same working format to small group teaching, with attention to question design, wait time, and how a facilitator distributes participation without calling the room to order.
Pre-Work: Active Learning Up Close, the small group companion to Active Learning at Scale. It opens two weeks before each studio date.
Dates and Registration
Length of Time: 4 hours
Location: Hybrid
Description: An extended block for faculty rebuilding a course rather than a single session. Dates fall between terms because that is when a revision can still be taught in the term that follows. No pre-work module is required, but participants should bring the course materials they intend to revise.
Dates and Registration
Length of Time: 1 hour
Location: Hybrid
Description: A slide deck can be well produced and still work against the teaching, and the faculty member presenting it is the last person positioned to notice. This session examines teaching slides against a design checklist participants may reuse in their own courses: what to remove, what to keep, and how to tell whether a slide supports the instruction. The checklist applies to any presentation regardless of how the first draft was produced. The course is listed in Blackboard as PowerPoint for Teaching.
Dates and Registration
Length of Time: Self-paced
Location: Online
Description: Poll Everywhere lets an instructor collect a response from every student in the room rather than from the few who raise a hand. This self-paced course covers building poll questions that produce usable information, running them during a session, and reading the results while there is still time to change what happens next. It is open for registration all year with no live dates.
Length of Time: Self-paced
Location: Online
Description: Padlet gives students a shared space to post, sort, and respond to each other's work, in a session or between sessions. This self-paced course covers setting up a board, writing a prompt students can act on, and deciding what to do with what they post. It is open for registration all year with no live dates.
References
Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active learning: Creating excitement in the classroom. School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University.
Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(23), 8410-8415.
Hake, R. R. (1998). Interactive-engagement versus traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses. American Journal of Physics, 66(1), 64-74.
Questions
Questions may be directed to teaching-elearning@bcm.edu.
Center for Teaching & eLearning, Huffington Department of Education, Innovation & Technology, BCM