Teaching and Learning Brown Bag: Should we ask or should we tell?

A large body of evidence demonstrates that strategies that promote active learning in the classroom lead to gains in students’ learning and attitudinal outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. In this presentation I will review the evidence that active learning approaches, which empathize students’ higher order thinking, lead to increases in examination performance and lower failure rates, close the achievement gap in underprepared students, and reduce the gender gap. I will further present a series of specific active learning, technology-based pedagogical practices I use to implement flexibility, accessibility and incorporate cultural diversity in my courses. Finally, I will introduce the Online Teaching Team, a curriculum model used at the College of the Environment to address the teaching needs of our faculty during the transition to online teaching/learning during the pandemic.