Even when, to both teachers and students, lecturing appears to be working, (students intently listening, nodding heads, taking notes), what’s going on in the minds of students probably looks a lot like what would be going on on the boat full of my friends – distraction, lack of interest, and only a vague recollection of what was said. Even though it can appear that lecture-based, PowerPoint-driven learning is effective, it rarely is, and is almost never as effective a use of time as the learning-by-doing approach that could be done in its stead.

- Roger Schank

Students need to be actively involved mentally and/or physically in learning in order to move through the Learning Cycle. Out of every 100 items in a passive lecture, students will remember approximately 10. If you took the same amount of time to actively involve students, you might only cover 75 items, but students would remember approximately 15, also those 15 items are more likely to be linked storage that can be retrieved more effectively in the future. Listen to a podcast about this topic.


Think about the goal of teaching; is the goal for you to transmit information or is the goal students remembering/understanding information? If you believe it is transmission, how do you know that what you say is learned?

The following slide show contains examples of active engagement in large medical classrooms. Click on individual images for an explanation of which technique is being used.

Mental Engagement Examples	Physical Engagement Examples
Learning by Doing (article)	Acting/Roleplaying/Creating video/Creating Songs
Instructional Strategies For Engaging Learners -ideas for activating learning, strategies for helping students process and retain information, and ways for you to have your students summarize what they have learned	Virtual Autopsy
Teaching in Large Classrooms Techniques Activities	Write, Pair, Share Students write their answer individually, share the written answer with the person next to them and discuss in class.
PowerPoint Games PowerPoint Issues	Medical Games
Dr. Kanthan's Pathology Review Games	Wordle is a site for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
Questions Questions at the level of the learning objective can repeat memorized material, improve problem solving or promote reflection.	Crossword Puzzles Eclipse Create your own crossword Simple Crossword Puzzle Game
Intentional Reading (using focusing questions that will be answered during reading)	Critical Thinking Strategies
Discussing (Structured Controversy) (Interview Matrix)	Performing Experiments/Simulations
Case Studies Integrated Case Learning ACDET - an online tool linking systems and diagnosis Journal of Medical Case Reports Clinical Cases and Images Cases Journal Medting	Performing Tasks/Procedures
Problem Solving	Labeling Diagrams
Cognitive Dissonance	Virtual Reality
One minute paper	Drawing (including graphical representations)
Web 2.0 technology the interactive web	Interactive animations that respond to student action
Using Humour - Scientific Method taught using the Holy Grail A Laughing Room Examples from university classes	Creating physical representations such as sculpture or Illness Scripts Argument Mapping Tutorial Graphic Organizers See knitted DNA image below.
Clickers (Student Response Systems)	Flashcards Anki
	Second Life
Periodic Table of Visualization Methods a tool for deciding which technique to use to help students learn visually - great tool for using the right type of chart for example.	Teaching Observation Skills
More Visualization tools	Photo editing tools (free, online)
Wolfram Alpha - amazing calculation, analysis search tool	Voice Threads

The following are a list of links to teaching ideas that actively engage students:

1. TIPS method
2. University of Arizona list
3. Project-based Medical Undergraduate Learning at McGill
4. Problem Based Learning
5. PBL at Queens
6. University of Alabama Teaching Support site
7. Medical Games
8. Success Types Medical Education Page
9. Death by PowerPoint
10. General resource page for images etc.

Return to Classroom Teaching Techniques
or The CASE Curriculum Model
or go on to Self Directed Learning
or use the left hand menu to pick another topic.