Why Active Learning Works
Transport yourself mentally to a classroom of your past when you were bored out of your mind. Maybe it was a boring subject. Maybe it was a boring teacher. Most likely it was just BORING en total. Most likely it was a lecture. You remember those, right? Sitting for an hour or two listening to an instructor or professor go on and on about something, taking notes to try to keep yourself awake (and of course, to regurgitate on an exam later).
Man. I sat through too many of those.
Usher in distance learning, and the equivalent of this classroom model turned out to be READING boring lectures in the form of pdf’s or watching a video of an instructor/professor lecturing.
Can I just watch paint dry please???
I’ve always been appreciative of teachers who make the effort to engage me in the subject matter. And truthfully, all the boring teachers I had throughout my many years of sitting in classrooms (including virtual and carceral ones) made me a much better teacher. I put myself in the chairs of my students and thought, “how would I want to learn about this subject?” Even when I teach in a higher ed setting (because let’s face it, most of our boring lecture classes happened in postsecondary classrooms).
How do we change the slow brain death of students everywhere? By engaging our students, of course. As an instructor/professor, there are a million resources out there on the internet and in professional development sessions about the importance of active learning and what that looks like in your classroom.
In short, active learning is an approach to instruction that involves actively engaging students with the course material through activities that promote higher order thinking skills (HOTS). Active learning engages students with content and places a greater degree of responsibility on them than instructional delivery like lectures. E-International Relations states, “The education literature commonly quotes studies showing that when material is delivered using a single method (i.e. students are passively listening) their concentration limit is between 10 and 20 minutes, a small fraction of a lecture.” If a student is sitting in a two-hour lecture, they only engaged in 10 to 20 minutes of the content. Lecture as the only delivery method in a course will at the very least meet Bloom’s Taxonomy levels of “remember” and maybe “understand.” Active learning cultivates HOTS (critical, logical, reflective, metacognitive, and creative thinking).
If you’ve ever been in a classroom, or your mom’s kitchen, or your dad’s garage, or driver’s ed, where you learned something hands-on, you’ve experienced the gap between what’s learned by reading or listening and what’s learned by doing. That’s where active learning makes sense. Bonwell and Eison described it as “anything that involves students doing things and thinking about the things they are doing.” Active learning is student-centered and prioritizes creating, collaborating, and thinking critically over passively consuming.
Want to test out what you’re doing in your classroom? Ask yourself who’s working the hardest: you or your students? If it’s you, then you need a little active learning in your lesson plans and syllabi.
Benefits of active learning in the classroom (even a virtual one):
Increases student interest and engagement
Develops collaboration skills
Assesses prior knowledge and current understanding
Encourages risk taking
Improves critical thinking
Kicks off creative thinking
Fosters problem-solving
Increases retention
Places content in real-world contexts
Who doesn’t want to be in THAT classroom? And who wouldn’t want to be the instructor leading it?
There are tons of examples of activities that can be used in in-person and virtual classrooms, and this reinforces the importance of continuous learning as a teacher. I’m amazed at the creativity and brilliance of people who persistently find ways of engaging students with learning. As for myself, I always assess who my students are, how they learn, and how I can deliver content in a way that will not only help them understand it, but get excited about it.
Our team offers some great professional development sessions that can show you and your team how to engage students and give you some new ideas to add to your repertoire. Shocker: the sessions are hands-on and chock-full of active learning activities to get you excited about taking what you’ve learned back to your students. Let me know if you want to party.
Alrighty then. Enjoy your morning (or afternoon or evening) coffee (or comfort drink of choice). Kick your brain in gear, do some research, and start building an active learning environment!
