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JANET RANKIN: A common active learning technique that people often use, or maybe the first technique that they use, is personal response systems. So that's an opportunity for students to respond to a question. And that can be anything. It's usually a multiple choice question, but it doesn't have to be. And it can be anything from a show of hands-- who thinks the answer is A, who thinks the answer is B, who thinks the answer is C-- to dedicated devices and applications that allow students to respond to questions. So there's pros and cons for each of the different techniques, but the essence of all the techniques is that students are given an opportunity to think about the answer that they think is correct, and then respond to that. And there is evidence to show, research that shows, that when students make a claim, when they're asked to make a public response, a public claim as to what they think the correct answer is, that makes them more committed to ...

JANET RANKIN: Another active learning technique that can be very, very effective in supporting student learning is the jigsaw. And it gets its name from the activity involved when you do a jigsaw puzzle. And usually, most people when they do a jigsaw will look for the-- they'll find all the edge pieces, or they'll find all the blue pieces, or they'll find all the pieces that have a certain image on them. You do the homogeneous aspects of the exercise. So you get all the edge pieces, the blue pieces, the particular image pizzas. But eventually, you have to take those pieces and put them together. You have to link them up with pieces that don't look quite like those pieces, so that's the heterogeneous component of it. And so what you do in a jigsaw is you ask students to become experts, if you will, homogeneous experts, in a particular area, on a particular topic. And you can do this by giving them a reading in class, or you can do this by asking them to...