Tailoring Active Learning for Teaching Assistants

As a teaching assistant, I only see my students once a week, and when I do, they work in small groups to complete wet lab experiments. Some of my previous TA postings have been in a more traditional tutorial format, but this setting is much the same: there is set material to cover and not much time in which to do it. Trying to make the most of the time I had and best address students’ questions, I stumbled into the concept of active learning and have a few tricks to share with other teaching assistants.

What is Active Learning?

Active learning is a broad term. Some of my favorite descriptions are: "anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing" (Bonwell & Eison, 1991); and "anything course-related that all students in a class session are called upon to do other than simply watching, listening, and taking notes" (Felder & Brent, 2009). Definitions and implementations vary across disciplines. Active learning can be as simple as a poll or as involved as a capstone project. While using this concept, I have found that the only vital element is a student’s involvement in their own learning.

Why use Active Learning?

There are a whole host of studies on the efficacy of active learning: better knowledge retention, skill development, community building, and a disposition for continuous learning. While I won’t unpack all the benefits, the best reason, in my opinion, to use active learning is to check in with my students. By employing active, low-stakes formative assessments, I can monitor student learning and knowledge gaps in real time. It provides continuous feedback on student understanding for both the student and the TA. With this feedback, I can speed up, slow down, or pivot entirely when needed. For students, the lower stakes (i.e., few or no marks) allow them to participate more easily, check their understanding of the material without penalty, and get constructive feedback to help them improve before summative assessments.

How to use Active Learning as a Teaching Assistant?

As teaching assistants, we have different constraints than an instructor or professor. TAs typically have little to do with course objectives or design, have much less time with students, and we work within limited contract hours. If the goal is to use active learning in our tutorial or lab settings, how do we make a big impact within our time constraints? My biggest lessons are to keep it short and sweet, and to balance impact and effort.

With limited time to plan and implement activities, I suggest starting with some of the many ready-made lists of active learning strategies. While some of the large active learning projects on these lists can give students great opportunities for higher-level learning (e.g., analyze, evaluate, and create), they frequently require time, small classes, and revising course design. Rather, many short activities can be modified for different disciplines and settings to make a big impact. Here are a few of my favourites:

• Polls or Clicker Questions: You can get a sense of student understanding by asking questions passively (e.g. putting a poll up on the white board that students can answer as they walk into tutorial) or actively (e.g. taking a few moments to let students answer a question with clickers or an electronic survey). These can be simple content questions to assess student recall with low stakes and no marks; or, you can get students involved in their own learning with metacognitive prompts. For instance, I use a poll to check which pre-lab question was most confusing to students, and we can revise together.

• Think-Pair-Share: This classic active learning strategy uses peer-to-peer learning approaches to enrich student engagement. I like to provide a practice problem and ask students to spend a few minutes working on it alone, then in pairs, and finally ask for volunteers to share as a group. Adding a second iteration (what happens if I change variable X?) can make this even more effective and get students to analyze similarities and differences.

• Spot the mistake or a Critique: Sometimes students are better able to understand what not to do. I use this strategy when students will be asked to complete a summative assignment that they are not very familiar with. For example, making a scientific poster for the first time can be intimidating, but critiquing other posters can make the process more approachable. Picking an example and balancing the highlights and improvements can be tricky, but one way I have tackled this is by using my own work. I provided the first poster I made as an undergraduate and modelled how to incorporate constructive criticism.

One of the biggest hurdles for active learning is student participation. What if no one raises their hand? Developing student buy-in takes some time, and the easiest way to build engagement is to reduce hurdles and highlight the benefits. I have found that lowering the stakes, and giving “help me help you” messaging, can go a long way. If active learning and its rationale are introduced early, it can be a great way to help students spot their own knowledge gaps as well as allow teaching assistants to best plan their tutorials and labs.

Teaching assistants work in all fields, in various class sizes and settings, and with differing expectations. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to making the biggest impact in limited teaching time, but I hope that I have left you with a place to start.

Author bio:

Jess is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology where she uses active learning in labs to boost student engagement. Jess was a recipient of the 2025 President’s Graduate Student Teaching Award and led a session on shared practices for active learning at CLT Teaching Assistant Professional Development Days.

References

Griffith University’s Active Learning Design Tool: https://app.secure.griffith.edu.au/active-learning/search

University of Central Florida’s list of Interactive Activities: https://fctl.ucf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2019/02/interactive_techniques.pdf

University of Toronto’s Active Learning Resources: https://tatp.utoronto.ca/resources/active-learning/

University of Sussex’s 100 Ideas for Active Learning: https://openpress.sussex.ac.uk/ideasforactivelearning/

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. 1991 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, The George Washington University. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED336049

Felder, R. M., & Brent, R., (2009). Active learning: An introduction. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242102584_Active_learning_An_introduction