January 110 is one of nine active classrooms on campus. (Elle Su | Student Life)

Washington University is looking to expand its number of active learning classrooms to meet growing demand for class spaces that facilitate collaboration. 

Active learning classrooms often include movable seating for group work, whiteboards for brainstorming, and digital screens for students to project their work. WashU currently has nine of these classrooms on the Danforth campus, and faculty and administrators are looking to add more of these rooms in the years to come.

The Center for Teaching & Learning (CTL) maintains the technology and physical infrastructure in active learning classrooms, and professors must apply to use these spaces.

“Preference is given for the active learning classrooms to those faculty who have specifically requested it because of the way they’ve designed their courses,” Michael Wysession, the Executive Director of the CTL, said. 

Tabea Linhard, Director of Global Studies, currently teaches a course in one of the University’s larger active learning classrooms, January 110, which can seat 60 students.

Linhard requested to hold her Global Futures course, one of the larger classes in Global Studies, in an active learning space to maximize student engagement. She designed the course to include pedagogical techniques that could be implemented in an active learning classroom.

“I think especially for larger classes, just like this one, it is a lot easier to get everybody engaged [in an active learning classroom],” Linhard said. “I think group work is a lot easier.”

One way that Linhard uses the classroom to facilitate engagement is by moving throughout the room to interact with different students and groups. 

“It’s a lot easier to move around the room for the instructor to begin with,” Linhard said. “You don’t have to stay behind the podium, you can wander around the room; you can kind of get closer to different people and it’s much easier to move from group to group.”

First-year Noor Huda, who is taking a course in an active learning classroom, has seen benefits from learning in these spaces.

“It forces you to pay attention,” Huda said. “The emphasis is always on engaging with the reading, engaging with people in conversation, and there’s something to be said about the open spaces and seating that kind of helps your brain breathe a little bit.” 

Other universities have built more active learning facilities than WashU, although Wysession said the CLT is advocating for more of these spaces to be added to campus in the coming years. 

Purdue University opened the Wilmeth Active Learning Center, in 2017, which contains 27 active learning classrooms with various layouts and arrangements.

Amy Haston, a senior educational technology consultant at Purdue, said that Purdue had invested in active learning even before opening the Wilmeth Center. In 2011, Purdue launched the IMPACT Program which educates faculty on how to teach using active learning techniques.

WashU’s CTL includes similar resources on active learning pedagogy on its website.

Similarly, the Health Sciences Education Center at the University of Minnesota, opened in 2020, contains 14 active learning classrooms with the combined capacity to hold 882 students.

While active learning classrooms vary in their layouts to meet the needs of different classes, they all facilitate teaching methods that break from traditional row-and-column seating with an instructor at the front of the room.  

“The design for active learning [classrooms], is doing a lot of activities that, our people in our psychology department would say, strengthen neural pathways that are associated with comprehension,” Wysession said.

The range in features means that professors utilize different capabilities based on the needs of their class. 

Eleanor Padini, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for Environmental Studies, benefits from using the less constrained physical space to walk between groups to engage with the entire class, similarly to Linhard. 

Other professors, such as Craig Smith, a senior lecturer in Biology, integrate the technology of the classrooms into their curriculum, to allow students to project their code and projects onto screens throughout the classroom.

Smith uses the screens located at each station to allow students in his course, Structural Bioinformatics of Proteins, to display their code to either their own group or the entire class. The collaborative nature of this course has made him feel more like a mentor to his students, as these active learning classrooms allow him to create a dialogue with his students.

“It’s just really conducive to that,” Smith said. “In a standard classroom, our standard way of lecture involves [the professor] sitting in front of the lecture; there’s not this two way exchange that we see with active learning.”

While classrooms such as January 110 are equipped with this technology, other active learning classrooms such as Simon 18 and McDonnell 362 include traditional whiteboards that allow students to display their work with their groups and the whole class.

In addition to the nine current active learning classrooms, Wysession said that the original plans for McKelvey Hall included an active learning classroom that would seat around 100 students. The room has not yet been constructed and currently sits as an empty space in the basement of McKelvey Hall.

“It would be the largest active learning classroom on campus,” Wysession said. “It hasn’t been built yet — it’s in the plans — but I sincerely hope that that gets built soon because it might be our flagship active learning classroom.”

Additionally, the CTL works each summer to renovate existing classrooms into active learning spaces, at a pace of roughly two classrooms per summer, according to Wysession. The Arts & Sciences Building,set to be built in the coming years, might include more active learning classrooms.

Both Wysession and Pardini are hopeful that some of the classroom space in this new building will be allotted for active learning classrooms.

“I think it would be phenomenal to have some active learning space there,” Pardini said. “Especially because it’s a central location, it’s really a very desirable location for anybody from any discipline from any department.”

As the CTL continues to convert spaces, Pardini said she believes faculty should continue to find creative ways to implement active learning, even in spaces that are not marked as active learning classrooms.

“You can work with whatever you have,” she said. “It might not be as conducive as a fully active learning classroom, but I don’t want that to stop teachers from trying.”