When students understand content deeply, they recognize main concepts and understand the relationships among ideas. But the typical processes students use to study are generally not designed to generate conceptual understandings. Instead, they tend to become passive learners. In this article, the authors present three commonly used classroom techniques--bell work, worksheets, and laboratory investigations--that have been converted from passive to active learning strategies. They also draw on the active and passive learning research to help teachers examine the structure of typical classroom instruction (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000). (Contains 5 figures.)