Overview
The Active Learning Classroom Special Interest Group (ALC SIG) will bring together current and former ALC instructors for monthly conversations with a CTL consultant throughout Fall 2026. Discussions will explore how these distinctive classroom spaces have opened new possibilities for teaching — and where they have posed challenges for instructors and students alike.
Conversations will draw on texts generated by ALC instructors themselves, including excerpts from interviews and observations conducted by a CTL consultant in Spring 2025. Two frameworks will guide our discussions: teacher noticing — the idea that ALCs can help faculty more readily attend and respond to student thinking — and adaptive teaching — the recognition that active learning is a highly contingent form of instruction, one that asks both students and faculty to think responsively in the moment.
The SIG has three goals:
- to deepen our collective understanding of how ALCs can serve as laboratories for equity-oriented teaching;
- to advocate for instructors who take on the risky, high-stakes work of ambitious, student-centered pedagogy;
- and to champion the design and expansion of these spaces at UC Berkeley.
