Active Learning

Learning Outcomes

Any Cascadia student can tell you the 4 outcomes that guide us: Think, learn, interact, and communicate. Inside and outside the classroom, students, faculty, administrators, and staff use these outcomes as goals in learning, decision making, and actions.

Decades of research have shown that students learn most from teachers who emphasize active, collaborative learning. As a lifelong habit, pursuing these outcomes encourages personal growth, enhances productive citizenship, and fosters individual and cooperative learning.

Think critically, creatively, and reflectively

Reason and imagination are fundamental to problem solving and critical examination of self and others.

• Create, integrate, and evaluate ideas across a range of contexts, cultures, and areas of knowledge
• Recognize and solve problems using creativity, analysis, and intuition
• Examine your own attitudes, values, and assumptions, and reflect on their implications and consequences

Learn actively

Learning is a personal, interactive achievement that results in greater expertise and a more comprehensive understanding of the world.

• Develop expertise, broaden perspectives, and deepen understanding of the world by seeking information and engaging in meaningful practice
• Construct meaning from expanding and conflicting information
• Engage in learning, both individually and with others, through reading, listening, observing, and doing
• Take responsibility for learning

Interact in diverse and complex environments

Successful negotiation through our increasingly complex, interdependent, and global society requires both knowledge and awareness of others and enhanced interaction skills.

• Build interpersonal skills through knowledge of diverse ideas, values, and perspectives
• Collaborate with others in complicated, dynamic, and ambiguous situations
• Practice civility, empathy, honesty, and personal responsibility

Communicate with clarity and originality

The ability to exchange ideas and information is essential to personal growth, productive work, and societal vitality.

• Organize and articulate ideas for a range of audiences and purposes
• Use written, spoken, and symbolic forms to convey concepts creatively
• Use technology to gather, process, and communicate information