Incorporate active learning

Mosaic Faculty Fellows provide a great introduction to active learning in the classroom. (And, if you have the opportunity, we recommend becoming a Mosaic Fellow yourself.) This fellowship allows IU faculty from different campuses, from different disciplines, and at different points of their academic career to collaborate, learn, and experiment.

Anne Allen and Margaret Wallen are good examples of this. Both are IU Southeast faculty members who are part of the current Mosaic Fellowship cohort, and both have found new ideas and a sense of excitement along the way.

Anne Allen has taught art history at IU Southeast since 1994. She is passionate about teaching but felt that she needed a greater variety of activities and approaches to teaching that would be more in tune with today's students.

"A lot of what I was doing before COVID seemed to work fine. But now that we have a different generation of students who have evolved in a different way since COVID, I thought that this fellowship may help me gain some new ideas."

Margaret Wallen has been a full-time biology faculty member since 2023. She said the amount of knowledge that science students are expected to have when they graduate has grown so dramatically that it is impossible to include hands-on lab activities to parallel important topics in lectures. She was curious about how active learning could help.

"How do I still teach this set of things, and how do I improve my teaching of it using active learning without having to cut content? That was my biggest concern. How do I make sure that they learn all this stuff but teach it in a way that they are retaining it?" said Wallen.

In the fellowship, faculty members meet several times over the course of an academic year. They start by taking part in the Mosaic Institute, a full-day, in-person event where they learn the basics of active learning and IU resources that can support them along the way.

Wallen said that the fellows shared their experiences and learned from each other. "We talked to other faculty members across disciplines about things that they tried in their classrooms, things that worked, things that didn't work, and I think that we all found camaraderie in the experience." Allen echoed this sentiment and added:

The fellowship also includes several additional online and face-to-face meetings throughout the year. To set the stage for each meeting, fellows read scholarly articles that cover topics that will be discussed in the meeting.

"Typically, we have some selected readings that are based on scientific evidence on a variety of topics, like getting student buy-in, how to put groups together, research that shows that active learning is successful and that students learn more with active learning — even if they don't think that they learn more with active learning," Allen said.

Both Allen and Wallen talked about how they applied what they learned to classes that they are currently teaching.

Allen decided to lean into the Transparency in Learning and Teaching ethos (also known as TILT) and tell students about why active learning is being used in the class and how it benefits them. In her classes, she introduces the concept of worldviews to her art history students, and they revisit this concept throughout the class. During the fellowship, she used what she learned to rework her explanation.

"Students really struggle with the concept of worldviews, so my intervention was taking a format that they gave the fellows from TILT and really working on an explanation of 'this is why you're doing this,' 'this is how it works,' 'here are some other examples.'" She said that the preliminary results from the class seem promising.

Wallen dipped her toe into active learning in a fall semester genetics class by introducing formative assessments and learning activities during class. For the spring semester genetics class, she completely flipped the class. With this technique, students review content before coming to class, and instructors use class time for activities that help students to engage with the material on a higher level.

The preliminary results were impressive. After students took the first test — from what she said is historically the hardest section of the class dealing with mathematical modeling, Wallen said, "pretty much all students increased their grade over the previous class. But what is more impressive is that this cohort has a higher average than the cohort before them when I was not doing a flipped classroom. As a result the students started to buy in a little bit more to this whole idea of active learning."

Wallen hopes that active learning can help students grow their content knowledge and hone their study habits to help them to succeed as they tackle more advanced concepts in upper division classes. For Allen, the experience has been rejuvenating, and the the fellowship gave her more tools to do things better and to do them more effectively.