Examples of active learning: 30 activities for class, online courses, and work

What makes an activity active learning

Charles Bonwell and James Eison defined active learning in their 1991 report as anything that involves students "in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing" (ERIC, 1991). In practice, an activity is active learning when every learner has to produce something: an answer, an explanation, a decision, a drawing, or a question. A hands-up question is active for the one student who answers and passive for everyone else in the room.

The ICAP framework from Michelene Chi and Ruth Wylie (Educational Psychologist, 2014) is a useful test for any example on this page. It sorts what learners do into four modes and predicts that learning increases as you move down the list:

• Passive: receiving, such as listening to a lecture or watching a video without doing anything else.
• Active: manipulating the material, such as highlighting, copying solution steps, taking notes word for word, or pausing and rewinding a video.
• Constructive: producing something new, such as explaining in your own words, drawing a concept map, or writing your own questions.
• Interactive: building on a partner's ideas, such as debating a position or asking and answering questions with a classmate.

Most of the examples below are constructive or interactive. The same content can be taught either way, as this comparison shows.

Passive and active versions of the same lesson

Passive version	Active learning version
Listen to a 50-minute lecture	Stop at each natural break so pairs compare and fix their notes
Watch a demonstration	Write down a prediction first, then watch
Reread the notes before a test	Close the notes and write down everything you remember, then check
Watch a training video to the end	Answer a question at the moment each skill is shown
Read a case study	Decide what you would do, then defend the decision to a group

A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies of undergraduate science, engineering, and math courses found that exam scores were about 6% higher in active learning sections, and that students in traditional lectures were 1.5 times more likely to fail (Freeman et al., PNAS). Our guide to active learning strategies covers that research and how to pick the right strategy for a class.

30 active learning examples at a glance

Times are typical ranges from common practice. Adjust them to your group.

Examples of active learning by setting and typical time

Example	Where it fits	Typical time	What every learner does
Think-pair-share	Any class	3 to 5 minutes	Answers alone, compares with a partner, then pairs report
One-minute paper	End of a class	1 to 2 minutes	Writes the most important point and one open question
Muddiest point	End of a class or reading	1 to 2 minutes	Names the part that is still unclear
Pause procedure	Lecture	Three 2-minute pauses	Compares and corrects notes with a neighbor
Retrieval warm-up	Start of a class	3 to 5 minutes	Writes what they remember from last time with notes closed
Predict, then observe	Demonstrations and worked examples	2 to 5 minutes	Commits to a prediction before seeing the result
Concept question with a vote	Lectures of any size	5 to 10 minutes	Votes, argues with neighbors, votes again
Mini whiteboards	K-12	About 1 minute per question	Writes an answer and shows it at the same moment as everyone else
Turn and talk	K-12	1 to 2 minutes	Explains an idea to the person next to them
Four corners	K-12 and adult groups	5 to 10 minutes	Moves to the corner that matches their view and defends it
Gallery walk	K-12 and college	15 to 30 minutes	Rotates through posted problems and adds to each one
Reciprocal teaching	Reading groups	20 to 30 minutes	Takes a turn leading the summary, questions, clarifying, and prediction
Role play	Any setting	10 to 20 minutes	Acts out a situation using the new skill
Jigsaw	Any class	One or two sessions	Learns one part well and teaches it to the group
Peer review of drafts	Writing courses and graduate seminars	30 to 60 minutes	Reviews a classmate's work against criteria
Conversation practice in pairs	Language classes	10 to 20 minutes	Speaks in a structured role play, interview, or debate
Case discussion	Business, law, medicine, and training	60 to 90 minutes	Takes a position on a real decision and defends it
Problem-based learning	Professional programs	Days to weeks	Works out what they need to learn to solve an open problem
Team-based learning	Courses with permanent teams	Each unit	Takes a readiness test alone, then with the team, then solves applied problems
Guided inquiry (POGIL)	Science courses	One class session	Works through a structured activity in a team with assigned roles
Structured debate	Any setting	30 to 60 minutes	Builds an argument and answers the other side
Flipped lesson	Any setting	Video before class, practice in class	Prepares alone, then practices with help
Branching scenario	Workplace training	5 to 15 minutes	Chooses an action and sees the consequence
Role play with an observer checklist	Sales, service, and management	15 to 30 minutes	Practices a conversation while a peer scores it
Teach-back	Onboarding	5 to 10 minutes	Explains a process back to a trainer or peer
After-action review	Teams after a project or incident	15 to 30 minutes	Compares what was planned with what happened, and why
In-video question	Recorded lectures and training	Under 1 minute each	Answers at the moment the concept is taught
Drawing response	Science, anatomy, maps, and diagrams	1 to 2 minutes	Marks or sketches an answer on the image
Recorded spoken answer	Language classes and sales training	Up to 2 minutes	Records a voice or video response
Structured discussion post	Online courses	15 to 30 minutes a week	Posts an answer and replies to a classmate's reasoning

Quick active learning examples for any lecture

These take 1 to 10 minutes and need nothing more than paper or a show of hands. You can add one at each natural break in a talk without rewriting the course.

Think-pair-share

A statistics instructor asks: "Would a bigger sample fix this biased survey?" Students write an answer for one minute, compare with a neighbor for two, and then a few pairs report to the room. Frank Lyman of the University of Maryland proposed the method in the 1980s. Keep the silent writing step, because it makes every student form an answer before the fastest voice is heard.

One-minute paper and muddiest point

In the last two minutes of class, students write the most important thing they learned and one question they still have. The muddiest point version asks only for the part that is still unclear. Both come from Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross's 1993 handbook Classroom Assessment Techniques, and Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center keeps a practical guide to these techniques. Sort the cards before the next class and open with the most common confusion.

Pause procedure

Ruhl, Hughes, and Schloss tested a simple change in 1987: three 2-minute pauses at logical breaks in a lecture, during which pairs of students compared and corrected their notes. In their study of 72 undergraduates, the classes with pauses scored significantly higher on free recall and on objective tests than the classes without them (Teacher Education and Special Education, 1987).

Retrieval warm-up

Open class with "Notes closed. Write down everything you remember about last week's topic." Then let students check their notes and fill the gaps. In a 2006 study, students who took recall tests on a passage remembered more of it two days and one week later than students who reread it, even though rereading made students feel more confident (Roediger and Karpicke, Psychological Science). You can try the video version in our active recall example.

Predict, then observe

Before a demonstration or worked example, every learner commits to a prediction in writing or by vote. A physics teacher asks whether a heavy ball and a light ball dropped together land at the same moment. A finance trainer asks what happens to a bond's price when interest rates rise. The wrong predictions tell you which misconception to address next.

Examples of active participation in the classroom

Active participation means every student responds. A question to the whole room that one volunteer answers gives you information about one student. These K-12 routines get an answer from everyone:

• Mini whiteboards. Each student writes an answer and holds it up on a count of three, so you see the whole class's thinking at once.
• Turn and talk. After a new idea, each student explains it to a neighbor in their own words. Listen in on a few pairs before you move on.
• Four corners. Label the corners of the room "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," read a statement, and have students move to their corner and give one reason.
• Gallery walk. Post five problems around the room. Groups rotate with a marker, add to each poster, and the last group at each poster summarizes it for the class.
• Reciprocal teaching. In reading groups, students take turns leading four moves: summarizing, asking questions, clarifying, and predicting. In Palincsar and Brown's 1984 studies with seventh graders who struggled with reading comprehension, the method produced sizable gains on comprehension tests that lasted over time (Cognition and Instruction, 1984).
• Role play. Students act out a historical negotiation, a store purchase in a new language, or a conflict between characters in a novel.

To check whether these routines reach every student, see our guide on how to measure student engagement.

Peer learning examples

In peer learning, students teach, question, and correct each other. Explaining an idea to a classmate shows the explainer which parts they cannot yet explain, and the listener gets an explanation in a classmate's words.

Peer instruction

Eric Mazur introduced peer instruction in introductory physics courses at Harvard in 1991. The instructor poses a conceptual multiple-choice question, every student votes, and students then try to convince a neighbor before voting again. Crouch and Mazur reported ten years of results showing better conceptual reasoning and better quantitative problem solving after the switch (American Journal of Physics, 2001). To see how a concept question works inside a recorded lesson, try this video quiz example.

Jigsaw

Elliot Aronson and a team of graduate students created the jigsaw classroom in 1971 in Austin, Texas, when newly desegregated schools brought students together who had never shared a classroom (jigsaw.org). A social studies teacher splits a biography into five or six segments, gives each student in a group one segment, and sends students with the same segment to an "expert group" to rehearse. Back in their home groups, each student teaches their part, and a short quiz at the end covers all of it. Because each student holds a different segment, the group needs every member's part to finish.

Peer review of drafts

In writing courses, students exchange drafts and review each one against the assignment's rubric before revising. Graduate seminars can go further with a mock journal review, in which each student reviews a classmate's paper the way a journal referee would.

Conversation practice in language classes

Language classes depend on peer practice, because pair work gives each student far more speaking time than whole-class drills. Common formats include role plays set in a restaurant or a shop, guided discussions, debates, interviews, and longer simulations in which students build characters in an imaginary town. For French teachers, Speakmeeters describes eight of these formats with their advantages and drawbacks in its guide to exercices de conversation en français.

Longer examples: cases, problems, and team projects

Case discussion

Harvard Business School students read about 500 cases during the two-year MBA program. In class, students do most of the talking, and each discussion centers on what they would do in the protagonist's position (HBS). The format works outside business schools too. A nursing educator can present a patient whose symptoms change over a shift. A support manager can replay a real escalation, like the one in the demo at the top of this page, and ask the team what the first reply should have been.

Problem-based learning

McMaster University's medical school launched the world's first problem-based learning program in 1969 (Health Professions Education, 2019). Small groups start with an open problem, such as a patient with unexplained symptoms, list what they already know and what they need to find out, research the gaps, and return to propose and defend a solution. The problem comes before any teaching on the topic, and the group decides what it needs to learn.

Team-based learning

Larry Michaelsen developed team-based learning in 1979, when a class Michaelsen taught grew from 40 to 120 students (Team-Based Learning Collaborative). In a pharmacology course run this way, permanent teams of five to seven students take a short readiness test on the week's reading alone, retake it together, and then spend the rest of the week deciding which drug to give in a series of patient cases, with every team revealing its choice at the same moment. Our active learning strategies guide lists the full sequence.

Guided inquiry

In Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), self-managed teams work through an activity that leads them to build a concept from data or models, while the instructor facilitates. A chemistry activity might show a table of atomic radii and ask teams to find the pattern before anyone names it.

Flipped lesson

In a flipped lesson, students meet new material on their own before class, usually through a short video, and class time goes to problems, discussion, and feedback. The Flipped Learning Network published a formal definition in 2014 to separate the approach from "homework at school" (Flipped Learning Network). The pre-class part is active only if students have to answer something, which is why many teachers put questions inside the assigned video and read the answers before class. Our flipped classroom page shows how that works in Mindstamp.

Active learning examples in workplace training

The workplace examples below mirror tasks people do on the job. They fit onboarding, compliance, sales, and leadership programs:

• Branching scenario. The learner faces a realistic situation, chooses an action, and sees what happens next. Try the hydrogen-leak decisions in our branching safety training example, or read our guide to scenario-based training.
• Role play with an observer checklist. Two people practice a discovery call or a difficult conversation while a third scores it against a short checklist, then the roles rotate.
• Teach-back. A new hire explains a process, such as issuing a refund, back to the trainer in their own words, and the trainer corrects the gaps on the spot.
• After-action review. After a project or incident, the team answers four questions: what was supposed to happen, what actually happened, why the two differ, and what to do next time.
• Spot the hazard. Learners click every hazard in a frame from a site walk-through. In Mindstamp this is a set of clickable hotspots on the video.
• Knowledge check at the point of skill. A required question appears right after the step it tests, and with Repeat Until Correct turned on, a wrong answer shows Try Again until the learner gets it right (how retries and passing scores work).

Active learning examples in online courses and video lessons

A recorded lecture is passive unless it asks the viewer to do something. In two experiments, Szpunar, Khan, and Schacter found that short memory tests placed between segments of an online lecture reduced mind wandering, increased note-taking, and improved learning, and the tested students were less anxious about the final test (PNAS, 2013). Examples that work online:

• A question at the timecode where a concept is taught, so a wrong answer points to the exact clip to rewatch.
• A poll that shows learners how everyone else answered, which works as the first vote in an online version of peer instruction.
• A drawing response, where learners circle the error in a circuit or label a structure on an anatomy image.
• A recorded spoken answer for pronunciation practice or a sales pitch.
• A route back to a short review clip when a learner misses a question.
• A discussion post that must quote a classmate's reasoning before disagreeing with it.

In Mindstamp, a question pauses the video at the exact second you choose and stores each answer against the learner. These features match the online examples above:

• Display Poll shows a chart of how all viewers answered.
• Drawing Response keeps the learner's markup as their answer.
• Video Response and Voice Response record up to 120 seconds in the browser (how recorded answers work).
• Branching sends a learner to a review section or another video based on the answer.

Answers appear in the learner report, and a SCORM package sends completion and score to a compatible LMS (SCORM export). For K-12 and college use, see interactive video for education.

Examples of active learning at home

Parents can use the same ideas without any special materials:

• Ask your child to teach you what they learned today, and ask "How do you know?" when they get to the hard part.
• At dinner, ask three questions about this week's spelling words or science topic instead of rereading the worksheet together.
• Before you read the next page of a story, ask what they think will happen and why.
• Ask them to draw how something works, such as the water cycle or a bicycle chain, and explain the drawing.
• Let them measure and double a recipe, which turns fractions into a real task.

The active learning strategies guide has more advice for parents, with the research behind each tip.

Common questions

Is asking students to share their ideas an example of active learning?

Yes. Asking children or adults to put their ideas into words is one of the simplest forms of active learning, because the learner has to produce an answer instead of receiving one. It works best when every learner shares, for example with a partner or on a mini whiteboard, and when you follow up with "Why do you think so?" so the learner explains their reasoning, not just the answer.

What is an example of active engagement?

A learner who stops a training video to choose how to handle a customer, then sees the result of that choice, is actively engaged. So is a student who argues with a neighbor about a physics question before voting again. The test is whether the learner produced something, such as an answer, a decision, a drawing, or an explanation. Watching and listening are passive, even when the learner pays close attention.

Is note-taking active learning?

It depends on the notes. In the ICAP framework, copying the slides or taking notes word for word is "active" in the narrow sense: the learner handles the material but adds nothing. Taking notes in your own words, writing questions in the margin, or drawing a diagram of the idea is "constructive," and the framework predicts more learning from it.

How do you get every student to take part?

Use structures that require an answer from everyone: think-pair-share, mini whiteboards, polls, and short writing before discussion. Keep the first activities low-stakes, give thinking time before calling on anyone, and call on pairs at random instead of waiting for volunteers.

Pick one quick example from this page, such as a two-minute pause or a retrieval warm-up, and use it in your next lesson. When you are ready to plan a whole course around active learning, our guide to active learning strategies explains how to choose and run each method, and our post on adaptive learning examples shows how lessons can change based on each learner's answers.