Minahil Amin, a graduate student in public policy at the University of Virginia’s Batten School, said engagement is the key to active learning, which is the key to student ownership. “The traditional model is still the lecture, and you might sit with your laptop browsing some site and you may or may not pay attention,” Amin said. “That’s a passive way to learn. Ownership means you see a need and you take charge about how you’re going to solve it.”