Walk into most chemistry classes on the first day of term and you likely won’t hear about Hattie’s Barometer. One might wonder (and her students do) what it's doing in Dr. Cathy Welder’s first day of Organic Chemistry 2. The answer, says Welder, is metacognition.

It wasn’t until Thayer Professor Eric Hansen witnessed colleague Peter Robbie teaching his classes differently that he realized he could change things up. “He treated his classroom like an art studio,” says Hansen of Robbie. “I thought, 'why couldn’t I do that?'"

On a Monday morning near the middle of spring term, students sit huddled facing a 15-foot, 8-screen video wall inside the Jones Media Center’s Innovation Studio. These students, part of Professor Kim Rogers's Sociology 1 course, are about to dive in to first-person video game Halo Combat Evolved to experience inequality firsthand.

The intro college physics class is governed by a few fundamental principles. Last summer, though the laws of physics remained largely intact, Professor Robin Millan transformed nearly every other aspect of her class as part of the Gateway Course Redesign Initiative.