An Active Learning Classroom (ALC) is essentially a room set up to facilitate communication between small groups of students in a classroom. Typically there will be a number of group tables, which may be round or U-shaped, and each group of 4-10 students will have their own group screen and whiteboard.

The students can hook up their own laptops or mobile devices to the group screen. There may also be a screen and a teacher console at the front of the room, although the teacher will generally be circulating around the groups to listen in and contribute to the students' activity. The teacher is able to control what is shown on each screen: sometimes the groups will each work with their own screen, and sometimes the screens may all show the same content.

The ALC is designed to encourage and facilitate interaction between students, rather than one-way communication from the teacher to the students. It is not impossible to have an old-school lecture or teacher-led presentation in an ALC, with students viewing the teacher's presentation on the group screens, but this is not the best way to use the ALC, and not a comfortable way to hold a lecture. Traditional teaching with the teacher holding the floor and the students passively receiving the words of the master have been replaced in the ALC design by students working together in active learning.

In an ALC the furniture may be moveable to allow different configurations. Typically the room will be furnished in a way that provides a good sound environment. Notice the carpet floor and sound-absorbent ceiling in the ALC on the left.

The point of all teaching is that students should learn. Teaching activities are only useful if they help students to achieve the course learning outcomes. Teaching in the ALC is no different, but the room is an expression of the idea that students construct knowledge in communication with each other. This is known as social constructivism and comes from the seminal work of Vygotsky.

The ALC design facilitates interaction between students to co-construct learning. This assumes active learning, which can be is contrasted with passive learning (when students sit back and take in a lecture or video). Active learning is characterised by:

• students are reading, writing, discussing, solving problems, not passively listening;
• learner-centered not teacher-centered;
• students are doing things and simultaneously thinking about the work they are doing knowledge is constructed by the students rather than transferred from the teacher;
• the teacher's role changes to design learning activities and to guide and evaluate knowledge construction;
• collaborative group work within cognitive strategies like questioning, clarifying, predicting, and summarising.

Expect some initial technical challenges! There is a learning curve to master the controls of the ALC technology. This is why CeUL offers workshops to get you up to speed. Teachers may also be new to active learning and socioconstructivist thinking. Students too— it is important to get their buy-in to this way of working. They will also need some learner training to upskill to use the room's technology.

Manage expectations. Once you have learned about the ALC's possibilities you need to decide what technology you will or will not use, and communicate this to students.

Seating
In a traditional classroom, students are facing forwards. In the ALC they are in small horseshoe or circle-shaped groups, facing each other. This means that student-student and student-instructor communication is easier, while attention to the instructor and the main screen (if there is one) is more challenging; there is no clear focal point in the room.

Teaching style
In a traditional classroom, the teacher may write on a board at the front of the room, or project a presentation onto the main screen. In the ALC, the teacher's presentation can be shown on the group screens that are placed on the walls around the room, but these can just as easily show something that a student wants to share with the members of the group or something they are creating together. A good way to use the potential of the room could be to demonstrate how to solve an example problem and then give students new problems to solve together. The teacher is not tethered to the front of the room while presenting. Students’ attention is on the wall screen and the group.

Here are some examples of active learning activities.

• Group work of all kinds, including Peer review (within and between groups). Many students are reluctant to participate in group activities. In some cases, this is because they are concerned about possible upcoming group work being assessed collectively. The distinction between valuable collaborative learning activities and undesirable collective assessment needs to be made clear.
• Minute writing, which can be an alternative to the "think" part of think—pair—share, where students first consider a question or statement independently, then talk to one other person before sharing with the whole group.
• Brainstorming: Think together and document ideas on the whiteboard before committing to a way of working.
• Beehive: Students discuss a given topic in groups as instructed, using their own screen and whiteboard. This can be followed by a relay activity, where students rotate to the next group’s whiteboard and build on their work, leaving their own thoughts on the whiteboard and/or screen they left behind.
• Jigsaw activities where students in a group read different texts and tell the others in the group about what they read. This can be set up so that all the students in the class who read the same text first discuss it together before being reorganised into groups where each student has read a different text. This is a form of Cross-groups, where after an initial activity new groups form with one person from each original group.
• Plenary roundup: report from each group to the whole class, projecting each group's material to all screens.
• Hands-on technology or labbing.
• Roleplaying.
• Problem-based learning: students work to apply their knowledge to problems to collaborate on solutions.
• Case-methodology: a popular teaching approach in law and medicine, often asking students to come to a decision through discussion.

If students are interacting, more people are simultaneously active and engaged than if the teacher keeps the floor.

Addressing ALC challenges.

Challenge 1 - Room issues
Some students are not facing the teacher, and there may be no obvious place for the teacher to stand. A remote slide advancer will be helpful, so you can move around using the wireless microphone. The group tables in the ALC may be too big to allow conversation across the table, and if the groups are too big, some students will likely remain passive. However, even if free-riding students may irritate more active students, the point of teaching is that students learn. Some will learn from their peers' efforts. There may not be microphones at the group tables, which means that it is difficult for students to hear what students in other groups are saying unless a wireless microphone is passed around.

Challenge 2 - Noise and distractions
with engaged conversation at every table, the level of sound in the room will rise. You may need a bell or some other way to get the students' attention when you want to move between activities. Students may drift off-topic, or be distracted by their digital devices, in both group work and teacher-led parts of the class.

Challenge 3 - Group work
Consider how you decide what the groups should accomplish, and how they are made up. If you give a single piece of material to each group rather than one to each student, students need to work together. They may need to be taught how to work together. Grading group work equitably, either as a group performance or as individual performance, is extremely difficult.

Challenge 4 - Student Engagement
Engagement in the classroom works better if you are able to address your students by name even if this means asking them to wear nametags. You want to make sure everyone is engaged.

Challenge 5 - Technology
The whiteboard is an important and familiar tool, and more reliable than digital technology. In the ALC, the teacher can project one group's screen to all screens to highlight a point.

Read more
The Centre for Educational Innovation at the University of Minnesota has a lot of good material based on their long experience of working with ALCs. Take a look at their advice on Teaching in an Active Learning Classroom, which includes links to research as well as teaching tips.

Does active learning work?

• Freeman et al.(2014) in a meta-analysis found STEM students were 1.5 times more likely to fail with traditional lecturing than with active learning.
• Active learning can also be used successfully in large lectures, see Marrone et al. (2018) on accounting students in Australia.

What do students think?

• Owens et al. (2017) investigated the paradox that while active learning has been found to enhance students’ motivation and attitudes, students resist active learning and give negative comments in course evaluations involving active learning;
• DeFeo et al (2020) looked at the inquiry-based approach and found that while students could see its merits, they prioritized grades, and were unwilling to trust an unfamiliar pedagogy if they perceived it jeopardized their grades.
• Deslauriers et al. (2019) found that STEM students resisted active learning, wrongly believing that they learn better with traditional lectures;
• a Canadian team (Holec et al, 2020) reported that the configuration of ALCs led to perceived increases in student engagement;
• another Canadian paper, Murphy and Groen (2020), reported three lessons learned in the first year with ALCs;
• and a Swedish paper, by Ahlström and Holmberg (2021), looked at examination in ALCs for nursing students and found they generally appreciated the interactive ALC examinations.

And teachers?

• Xiaoshan Zhu, et al. (2018) found that the ALC generated greater teaching and learning enjoyment, deepened engagement, amplified interaction, enhanced group activity efficiency and fostered the development of creative ideas.
• Avidov-Ungar et al (2018) asked how participants were able to leverage the use of the ALC to implement innovative pedagogies. They found that teachers used the ALC according to their strengths and weaknesses in technological and pedagogic knowledge, suggesting a need for integrated technological-pedagogic guidance.

Active learning advice from Universities of Minnesota and Michigan

• Active learning
• What is Active Learning? An introduction

• Ahlstrom, L., Holmberg, C. (2021). A comparison of three interactive examination designs in active learning classrooms for nursing students. BMC Nurs 20, 59
• Avidov-Ungar, O., Leshem, B., Margaliot, A., & Grobgeld, E. (2018). Faculty use of the active learning classroom: Barriers and facilitators. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 17, 485–504.
• DeFeo, D. J., Tran, T. C., & Gerken, S. (2020). Mediating students’ fixation with grades in an inquiry-based undergraduate biology course. Science & Education, 1-22.
• Deslauriers, L., McCarty, L. S., Miller, K., Callaghan, K., & Kestin, G. (2019). Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 116(39), 19251–19257.
• 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 of the USA, 111(23), 8410–8415.
• Holec, V., & Marynowski, R. (2020). Does it matter where you teach? Insights from a quasi-experimental study on student engagement in an active learning classroom. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 8(2), 140–164.
• Marrone, M., Taylor, M. & Hammerle, M. (2018) Do international students appreciate active learning in lectures?”, Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 220.
• Murphy, M. P. A., & Groen, J. F. (2020). Student and instructor perceptions of a first year in active learning classrooms: Three lessons learned. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 13, 41–49.
• Owens, D.C., Sadler, T.D., Barlow, A.T., & Smith- Walters, C. (2020) Student motivation from and resistance to active learning rooted in essential science practices. Research in Science Education 50, 253–277.
• Xiaoshan Z. G., Jones, E. M., & Bailey, J. H. (2018). Technological innovation or educational evolution? Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 18(2).