Practical Ideas for Improving your Teaching Goals & Strategies: Active Learning

This seminar is geared to those of you who plan to apply for academic jobs in the sciences, yet have little or no formal teaching experience in the U.S. The objective of the seminar, led by the Associate Director for Science and Learning at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, is to help you think about your goals as an instructor and what strategies you might use to reach them.

The focus here will be on active learning, which has been repeatedly shown to improve student performance, reduce student achievement gaps, and lower student failure rates, making it one of the most robust evidence-based pedagogies, particularly in STEM disciplines. The seminar will explain what active learning is, what the recent evidence is supporting its use, and how to incorporate it into your classroom. In addition, it will also focus on the principle of "backward design," a mechanism of designing a course from a student-centered perspective to best enable their success.