Best Practices: Active Learning
Encouraging this is your classes is is one of Chickering & Gamson's "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education" What is It?
Active Learning is oft talked about and oft misunderstood. In short, it can be defined in part by its opposite, Passive Learning. Active Learning has students somehow involved or being an engaged participant in their learning. As Chickering and Gamson famously put it:
"Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in classes listening to teachers, memorizing pre-packaged assignments, and spitting out answers. They must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves." (Encourages Active Learning, Chickering & Gamson)
Getting Started Worksheet:
Worksheet for Developing Active Learning Activities (PDF)
[Step 4 of L. Dee Fink's Integrated Course Design Workbook]
What Are Key Research/Scholarship Starting Points?
Likewise, as Ken Bain puts it in his book What the Best College Teachers Do, the goal of the traditional passive teaching setup then is to create the "bulimic student", who can binge on new information and purge it back on quizzes and tests to then be empty ready to binge on the next chapter of new info. But research tells us that for the majority of adult learners, this cycle is inadequate to foster long term retention or application of material and erodes student motivation. Further, citing Studies by Heller and Amiran, Fink states that "...higher education is currently turning out graduates who neither have a good general knowledge nor know how to engage in the kind of complex thinking and reasoning that society today needs." (pg 3, Creating Significant Learning Experiences).
Active Learning by contrast, seeks by design and intent to make students part of the learning process through doing. Bonwell & Eison define it simply as "instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing." (pg iii, Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom).
How Do you Address This/Use It?
Fink's Integrated Model of "Holistic" Active Learning incorporates the literature to diagram an effective active learning activity as having three components:
Bonwell & Eison. Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom.(1991. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports)
What are Potential Issues/Downsides to Be Prepared For?
TIME -
For a full cycle of preparatory baseline information, logistics, planning and class time for the activity and then personal and group reflections... it can take a week or so of your course to run a complete cycle of an active learning activity. As such, you need to make sure to structure it such that it is a "rich" learning experience that addresses as many of your course learning objectives as possible as well as assessments.
Student "deprogramming" -
Many students (and faculty) have had many more passive learning experiences than active learning activities. Some may even have not had any active learning activities previously. As such they may be initially resistant to having to engage with the activity. Typically, however, even those students are often converted to the excitement and novelty of active learning.
Logistics -
Depending how elaborate your active learning experience is and in what kind of an environment (classroom, workplace, etc.), you may have extra legal and logistical issues to make sure are covered. Here again, the educational "payoff" for your class will usually demonstrate its worth for all the extra headaches it may cause.
Examples How This Might Be Implemented in a Distance - Online/Hybrid/Video Conferencing Course?
After reading some course material, assign students to rent and watch a movie illustrating the material in action. Have student write personal reflections and follow up with class discussion board discussion or during a live class session .
After baseline readings, have students find some sort of local "field" professional practitioner in the topic and have them either interview or shadow the professional. Then write a personal reflection and then share with rest of class either during live class or via discussion board.
After baseline readings, have students be assigned roles to do a role play based on applying the material and either via timed discussion board responses or in a live class session, have them role play out their roles. then do personal and then group reflections (either on a discussion board or live class session).
Etc.
(Image Credit: Fink & Ross - "Creating Significant Learning Experiences")
Information & Ideas
To have a meaningful educational experience, students need to be prepared for the active learning activity with appropriate baseline information which is your usual class content.
Examples: a-understanding weight distribution; b-studying the Lincoln-Douglas debates; c-learn about the spread and transmission of germs
Experience
Through some sort of either direct "doing" themselves or direct observation of someone else "doing", students need some sort of activity.
Examples: Constructing a balsa wood bridge to hold a variety of weights; b-Re-enacting the Lincoln-Douglas debates or holding a class debate on who won and why; c-Shadow hospital staff as they use infection control procedures.
Reflection
Students then need to decompress and reflect on what they have done or observed as well as the learning process. This should have two elements:
Self Reflection
Each student reflect on the experience and how the course material was used/worked in action, as well as their individual learning.
Peer/Group Reflection
Each with small groups of classmates or as a class as a whole, share observations, reactions or new/remaining questions.