This spring I am participating in the Graduate Teaching Community (GTC) at UC Davis. This is an informal group that meets weekly to discuss an array of topics related to teaching. Each participant leads one meeting per quarter and then summarizes that meeting for the GTC blog. I led the first meeting and wrote up the following summary. You can see the original here.

This quarter, the Graduate Teaching Community decided to shift weekly discussions to a journal-club format, in which we read and discuss a peer-reviewed paper relating to college teaching each week. Our topic this week was active learning and the discussion was based on a review, “Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research” (1). While the review is now a decade old, it is worth reading, as it presumes limited familiarity with education research on the part of the audience, making it more accessible to non-specialists. Our discussion of the paper had two main phases – we talked about overall challenges in interpreting educational studies and then went over active learning, collaborative learning, and problem based learning. Continue reading →