Active Learning Activities

Spinning the Data? Thinking Critically about Maps

Students create choropleth maps to explore how maps can inform, persuade and mislead.

Take it Outside: A Field Trip in Three Acts

This activity serves as a field trip template to engage students with pre, during, and post-visit observations and analysis.

Let Me Draw You a Picture…

Students use visual thinking to diagram / illustrate a subject with the only criteria being they have expert knowledge of it.

Editing Exercise: Mock Academic Conference

Research, writing & editing activity that builds interpretive skills and the ability to incorporate research.

Drawing to Learn: Doing Science is more Complex that You Think

Students draw a diagram of how they think scientists "do science." These are improved then compared with an expert diagram.

100 Years of Work

This is a jigsaw activity where students map key developments in workplace design over 100 years.

Group Work Project Contracting

For instructors planning student group work projects over many weeks or months.

Role Reveal 201: Exploring Interdisciplinary Collaboration

In teams, students from each discipline complete a patient interview then contrast their approaches.

Cross-Disciplinary Synergy 101: Uniting Expertise for Success

In teams, students interact, share information on their profession, and create cases where each discipline is needed

Controversy in the Science Classroom: Nature of Science Quiz

This activity aims to bring about conceptual change by making explicit common misconceptions about the nature of science.

Don’t go NUTS: A Case Study on the Physiology of Stress

In this activity students apply their knowledge of the physiology of the stress response to a real-life research scenario.

Preparation for Future Learning: Electric Flux

In this worksheet activity, students are introduced to the concept of flux and the relation between field lines and area.

An Abundance of Bells

The aim of this activity is to demonstrate that many continuous data of nature and psychology follow a normal distribution.

Instructional Survey

The aim of this activity is to provide students with an overview of survey design and execution.

Harvard Implicit Bias Test

In-Class Think Pieces: Course Pack

Vénus d’Ille: Police Enquiry

This activity has students challenge the literal meaning of a text (ie. the supernatural explanation for a murder).

Durkheim Suicide: Functionalist and Conflict Theory

In this activity, students compare 4 psychological perceptive of suicide (anomic, fatalistic, egoistic, and altruistic).

Sustainability Development Plan (Part 1 and Part 2)

In this activity, students learn to define sustainability and apply this to a single Montreal neighbourhood. 

Rédaction d’un Paragraphe de Texte Expressif

In this multiple-class activity, students write a “texte expressif”, applying theory & grammatical lessons learned in class.

Let’s Role Play the French Revolution!

Disappearing Sea Otters

Students take the role of an ecologist and try to analyze species behaviours and predict population change.

Rhetorical Strategies

Projects on Junot Diaz: “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”