An instructor contemplating a course transformation to incorporate a student-centered learning environment may feel faced with what seems like a high-wire balancing act--a constantly renegotiated compromise between students' legitimate needs for structure, well-understood expectations, and good grades and instructors' foreknowledge that the path to intellectual maturity is "in the doing," particularly if the "doing" presents a reasonable challenge. One of the authors was beginning to lose her balance on the high wire of active learning when she was fortunate to have the opportunity to represent her institution's fledgling problem-based learning (PBL) program at a National Science Foundation-sponsored conference on inquiry approaches to science teaching held at Hampshire College. Her dilemma stemmed in part from the necessity to use the PBL method in one section of a multisectioned, introductory biology course with a common syllabus. Was there room for students to value forging their own path through the content-laden atmosphere of a good PBL problem, or would the specter of the "prescribed sequence of topics" outlined in the common syllabus undercut the value of all but the most direct path? In this article, she shares how she discovered the wonders of concept mapping as an answer to the instructional dilemmas she faced. She discusses the fundamentals of concept mapping and the lessons she learned from using it. (Contains 1 figure.)