5 Ways to Encourage Active Learning in Familiar Classroom Activities

Engagement is easy to misread. A class may look engaged without revealing how deeply students are “thinking about what they are doing,” the central element of a widely cited definition of active learning. So how do we distinguish superficial engagement from meaningful cognitive work? And how do we plan lessons that promote deep thinking?

Teachers can foster deep thinking and make it more visible by adapting familiar routines to require students to explain their reasoning, recall what they’ve learned, and revise their answers. These strategies make it clear that active learning is the opposite of a “spectator sport”: Fans might follow every move, cheer, and feel deeply invested in the outcome, but the players are the ones who are busy making decisions, adjusting, and pushing their limits. Likewise, students engaged in active learning are problem-solving instead of only following someone else’s reasoning.

Teachers set the conditions to deepen thinking through structure and guidance, and I’ll show how to do that using these common routines: turn-and-talk, video viewing, small-group discussion, notes review, and exit tickets. A few adjustments to these routines can often promote more active learning and make students’ thinking easier for the teacher to discern.

Upgrade 1: Turn-and-Talk ➔ Claim + Evidence

During a turn-and-talk exercise, students discuss a teacher’s question with a nearby partner. Sometimes those discussions remain superficial, especially when students state their opinions (“I thought the ending was good”) without explaining their reasoning.

Active learning alternative: Have students support a claim with evidence instead of only offering their opinion, and have partners offer additional evidence or a counterargument. Researchers have shown that cognitive engagement deepens when students build on, question, and challenge each other’s reasoning.

• Elementary English language arts (ELA): “Turn to your partner and describe what you think the main character will do next. Use this sentence starter: I predict ___ because ___. Partners, your job is to say whether you agree or disagree, using a detail from the book.”
• Middle school history: “Tell your partner which factor you think contributed most to the Union’s victory in the Civil War. For evidence, cite a fact from your notes. Your partner must challenge or strengthen your claim. Revise your position if your partner’s evidence changes your thinking.”
• High school chemistry: “Fish are suddenly dying off in a lake. Looking at the handout with water-quality data, determine which factor offers the strongest explanation. Support your position with two data points. Then your partner identifies evidence that challenges your explanation.”

Upgrade 2: Video Viewing ➔ Pause and Produce

A video may hold students’ attention but allow them few opportunities to check their understanding or apply new ideas.

Active learning alternative: Pause the video at key points and have students answer a few questions, explain a concept, or apply what they’ve learned to a new situation.

Research supports brief quizzing during videos. A 2022 study found that a group of college students who wrote explanations during pauses of a video about the human kidney “significantly outperformed the restudy group” on a subsequent test. This and other studies suggest that pausing to give quizzes during a showing of a video can improve retention; asking students to generate explanations may also help them apply what they’ve learned.

• Elementary science: Pause a video showing how seeds travel and say, “Draw one way a seed moves to a new place. Label the part that helps it travel, and explain how it works.” Resume the video so that students can check and revise their drawings.
• Middle school history: Pause a video showing two causes of a historical event and say, “Explain how the two causes contributed to the event.” Have partners draw a cause-and-effect diagram, then use the next video segment to check and add to it.
• High school PE: Pause a video that demonstrates a basketball chest pass. Say, “Name two techniques you noticed. With a partner, practice three passes each while your partner watches for those techniques. Use your partner’s feedback to identify one adjustment that would improve your chest pass.”

Upgrade 3: Small-Group Discussion ➔ Answer Solo, Discuss, Answer Solo Again

During a small-group discussion, one or two students may dominate while their peers check out of the conversation. The resulting group answer might be strong even though every member was not actively thinking.

Active learning alternative: Build individual accountability into collaboration. Ask students to answer a question independently, discuss their answers in a small group, and then independently revise or confirm their answers and explain their reasoning.

In a 2016 study of middle school physical science students using clickers to answer a question before a group conversation, individual accuracy rose after peer discussion with “minimal evidence of students off task.” And a 2009 study involving undergraduates found that explaining an answer to a peer and evaluating a peer’s explanation gave students opportunities to develop “communicative and metacognitive skills that are crucial components of disciplinary expertise.”

• Elementary math: Display a rectangle that is not a square. Then say, “Does this rectangle have four lines of symmetry? How do you know?” Students answer independently, test their reasoning by folding paper rectangles in groups, then independently revise or confirm their answers.
• Middle school ELA: Display this sentence: “I never said she stole my notebook.” Students independently choose two different words to emphasize and describe the different meanings created by each choice. The answers are shared in groups; peers question or challenge the implied meanings. Then students independently revise or confirm one interpretation and explain how emphasizing a specific word changes the message.
• High school biology: Say, “When someone loses 10 pounds of body fat, what happens to most of that mass? Does it leave the body in sweat, urine, or exhaled breath, or is it converted to heat?” Students choose independently, discuss the question in small groups, then revise or confirm their answer and explain their reasoning.

Upgrade 4: Notes Review ➔ Closed-Notebook Retrieval

Studying class notes can lead students to overestimate their understanding because the material looks familiar. Simple recognition doesn’t mean students can fully explain a concept.

Active learning alternative: Ask students to reconstruct the main ideas of a lesson without notes. Researchers have found that “taking a memory test not only assesses what one knows, but also enhances later retention, a phenomenon known as the testing effect.” Students can then check their answers against their notes for accuracy. Here are some prompt examples:

• Elementary math: “Sketch as many different fraction models as you can remember from yesterday’s lesson.”
• Middle school history: “Without looking at your notes, write down three main reasons for the migration we discussed on Tuesday.”
• High school ELA: “On a blank sheet, map out the relationships between the main characters from memory.”

Upgrade 5: Exit Tickets ➔ Answer, Rate, and Revise

Students sometimes answer traditional exit tickets (“Write down one thing you learned today”) with a vague, surface response such as “I learned about fractions.”

Active learning alternative: Give students an exit ticket with a short-answer prompt (not multiple-choice). Have them write their answer and circle one confidence level (low, medium, or high) to represent how well they think they understand the content.

Before the next class meeting, write feedback that identifies what’s missing or incorrect in the students’ answers. For a student who answered, “Why does a puddle disappear?” with only “Evaporation,” you might respond, “You named the correct process. Now explain what’s happening to the individual water particles.” During class, provide students a couple of minutes to revise their answers using only your feedback. For children whose answers are already strong, offer an extension question: “Why does a shallow puddle evaporate faster than the same amount of water in a tall, narrow glass given the same conditions?” Have students compare their original and revised answers, or explain how the extension question deepened their understanding. Then they can explain whether their confidence changed and why. If some students’ revised answers are still incorrect or incomplete, reteach the idea to that group.

What makes this active learning? Students are generating an answer from memory, assessing their knowledge (metacognition), and applying your guidance to improve their explanations.

• Elementary math: “On your sticky note, solve the problem on the board. Then draw a smiley face if you feel confident in your answer, a face with a straight mouth if you’re unsure, or a sad face if you’re not confident. Stick it on the door on your way out. Tomorrow, use my feedback to revise your solution and rate your confidence again.”
• Middle school science: “Explain the difference between a physical and a chemical change. Beneath your answer, write: ‘Confidence: 1 (not at all confident) to 5 (very confident).’ Next class, revise your explanation using my feedback. Then rate your confidence again and explain any change.”
• High school ELA: “State the author’s primary argument. Rate your confidence (low, medium, high). When I hand these back tomorrow, you’ll have two minutes to use my feedback to revise your answer. Then rate your confidence again and explain any change.”

Deep thinking takes effort. Routines like these give that effort structure.

What Active Learning Looks Like: A Checklist

The checklist below translates research on active learning into student-centered strategies, including some described above. Its purpose is to support instructional planning, not score your classroom practice. Choose the ones that best fit your class and content.

To encourage active learning and make thinking visible, have students do the following:

1. Draw conclusions or make connections that aren’t explicitly stated in the material.
2. Explain to others how or why an answer works.
3. Build on or challenge peers’ reasoning.
4. Recall what they have learned without referring to their notes or learning materials.
5. Explain the steps in a worked example, then apply the approach to a new problem.
6. Revise their work or improve their learning strategies based on feedback.
7. Describe what they understand, identify uncertainties, and decide what to work on next.
8. After discussing a problem with peers, solve a similar problem independently.
9. Represent an idea with a diagram, model, concept map, timeline, or analogy, and then describe how the different parts relate to the core ideas.
10. Compare texts, problems, or models to identify important patterns and differences.

The next time you design a lesson, ask yourself, “What are students doing with the content?” Then make a habit of asking students, “How do you know?”