Terminology Tuesday: Active Learning

I read a fantastic article on Active Learning, written by Christopher Buddle, in University Affairs this morning, and it served as inspiration for this week’s terminology Tuesday.

Active Learning

According to Buddle (2015), “Active Learning is a philosophy and an approach in which teaching over beyond the “podium style” lecture and directly includes students in the learning process.” With the millennial students and those to come, this seems to be a teaching strategy that will become increasingly popular. When I consider myself as a student, I learned a lot from the traditional teaching approach, but it was more akin to the professor making deposits into the student’s mind. You go to the lecture, you’re talked at for an hour or more, and even if you don’t have issues plaguing your attention and focus, you’ll likely get distracted sometime within that hour. This is why active learning will be important when it comes to enhancing student engagement and overall academic achievement.

Active learning strategies discussed in the Buddle (2015) article include:

• The teacher becoming the student
  • Teacher poses questions to students drawing from material taught within the lecture.
• Clear and muddy
  • Students indicate areas of the lecture that were clear, and other areas that were muddier or more confusing; in the next lecture, the teacher spends some time re-explaining the more universally muddy components.
• Groups
  • Students are placed in groups to discuss a particular question and they report their response to the entire class.
• Instant feedback
  • Students are provided with instant feedback in the form of scratch-off cards. I have to admit that this seems a bit more complicated an approach, so the uptake by other teachers (unless the cards are provided by the institution) may be slow. However, instant feedback is very important, and can be provided through other means (e.g. online quizzing).
• Pair and share
  • Students pair up and discuss the teacher-posed question with one another.

The great thing about these strategies is that they force the students to become more engaged with the material. Students may initially find these approaches uncomfortable, but in the long run they will likely lead to increased information retention, and ensure that students are actually paying attention to the lecture instead of zoning out mid-way through.