Colleagues at Rice University have posed an interesting topic in a post about active learning. I have written a number of posts about how and why active learning is a good teaching strategy. Many of our faculty at BRCC have adopted active learning strategies. Many of the strategies have come from the Active Learning Manual that I have published annually for almost a decade. But the article addressing active learning poses some good prompts that can help us to dig deeper into the topic. This one for instance: "For years, the term has filled a gap for us. It has functioned rhetorically as a way to contrast evidence-based teaching practices (a much better term, by the way) with more traditional methodologies, but ultimately the wide-ranging utility of this classification is also its drawback. Although, as Cynthia Brame notes, some scholars have tried to create an operational definition for active learning, they also acknowledge the category is enormously broad. This breadth is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Indeed, it means that we have a lot of options for helping students to learn. The problem is that active learning has come to mean all things to all people and essentially encompasses everything that is not passive." You can read the entire article post here. As we begin to plan for the spring 2019 semester, I hope you will consider teaching methodologies that have been proven to help students learn, many of which are active learning strategies.