WHAT IS ACTIVE LEARNING ?

IMPLEMENTING  ACTIVE   LEARNING.

WHAT   IS   ACTIVE  LEARNING ?
Active learning involves students doing something and thinking about what they are doing. Examples include discussions, surveys, laboratory exercises, in-class writing, role-playing, small-group or individual presentations, and field trips. Active learning requires students to take a participatory role in learning, rather than to adopt a receptive, passive posture. According to Charles Bonwell (1995), active learning often involves one or more of the following characteristics:

• There is less emphasis on the transmission of information and greater emphasis on developing analytical and critical thinking skills.
• Students do something other than simply listen passively.
• Students are engaged in activities.
• There is more emphasis on exploring attitudes and values held about course material.
• Students generally must adopt higher-order thinking?critical thinking, analysis, evaluation.
• Both students and teachers receive more and faster feedback.

Active learning methods usually result in superior performance. In studies comparing classrooms using active learning with those using passive learning, active learning methods generally result in greater retention of material at the end of a class, superior problem-solving skills, more positive attitudes, and higher motivation for future learning (Meyers & Jones, 1993; Bonwell & Eison, 1991; McKeachie et al., 1987). Researchers thus generally conclude that active learning produces educationally superior results. One team describes their conclusions as follows:

?Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class 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, apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.? (Chickering & Gamson, 1987, p. 3)

Active learning increases students? interest and attention. This is important given the tendency for students? attention to wax and wane the class period. One study found that students? concentration and attention declines precipitously after the first ten minutes of class time (Thomas, 1972). By adopting active learning methods, one can maximize student attention.

Finally, active learning may benefit students by providing greater and richer enjoyment of class meetings. Students like classes that involve active learning, and teachers typically find such classes more fun and less boring as well. Consider, by analogy, the story of the guru and his disciples. One morning, as the guru was teaching his students, a bee flew into the room but could not find its way out, repeatedly flying up against a glass window in vain attempts to get outside. ?Watch the bee,? the guru instructed his students. The bee continued to fly into the window until it hit the window and fell to the ground, stunned. The guru picked up the bee and placed it on the ground outside. ?What have you learned?? he prompted his disciples. A new student, anxious to get on with the day?s study, objected. ?Why not simply tell us what it is you wish us to learn instead of forcing us to struggle needlessly?? he complained. The guru picked up an apple from a nearby bowl and responded, ?Would you like me to eat this for you, or would you enjoy it more if you ate it yourself??

The Challenge of Active Learning
If active learning is more educationally desirable and more enjoyable, then why is it not the norm in education? There are several obstacles to teaching with active learning techniques. Such obstacles include:

• Breaking social norms
• Surrendering control and taking risks on the part of the teacher
• Advance planning
• More effort from both teacher and students
• Covering less material in class

Teaching through active learning involves breaking social norms. Classrooms, like all forums for interpersonal contact, have social norms. Teachers and students alike have come to expect that certain things ?must? happen in a classroom: Teachers stand and lecture; students sit and listen; teachers direct the class session; students take notes. Active learning involves departures from such expectations: Teachers may ask questions rather than state conclusions; students may move around while participating in an exercise or making a presentation; student input may drive class content with the teacher following the students? lead. Therefore, deciding to involve students actively in the classroom requires a willingness from both teacher and student to break social norms. As in other settings, social norms are powerful, and breaking them can be stressful. By contrast, passive learning methods are easier and less threatening.

Teaching through active learning involves surrendering control and taking risks. In a passive learning environment, the teacher dictates what is said and what events occur in the classroom. With active learning, students assume greater control over class content. For example, a class discussion requires input from students. This makes the classroom less teacher-directed. Teachers may dislike not knowing what to expect from their students, and students may feel uneasy about shouldering responsibilities for which they may feel ill prepared. Also, since teachers generally think of themselves as good lecturers, it is difficult adopting alternative instructional methods about which they may feel less confident.

Teaching through active learning involves advance planning. All teaching requires some degree of advance planning. However, passive learning methods generally require the least teacher preparation. A lecture that has been delivered repeatedly over years takes little effort to deliver again. Similarly, students engaged in passive learning do not need to do much before class. They can simply show up and take notes. By contrast, active learning methods require a teacher to carefully consider in advance what he or she will want students to do in that class session. This preparation may require responding to student input from previous sessions, anticipating the idiosyncrasies of current students, taking the time to think through specific examples intended for class use, carefully rehearsing the mechanics of particular class activities, constructing visual aids or handouts, jotting down specific questions that will be used to inspire or structure class discussions, and so forth. Students about to engage in active learning class sessions may need advance preparation as well, since their capacity to apply concepts will require some degree of understanding those concepts. Teaching through active learning involves more effort from both teacher and students. It takes real effort and work to employ active learning effectively. Greater time is spent in preparation and more work is required during class. By contrast, passive learning requires less effort from both teacher and students.

Teaching through active learning involves covering less material in class. It takes time to solicit and listen to input from students. And since the teacher has partially surrendered control over what happens in class, less content is covered when active learning techniques are used. In a passive learning environment, the primary function of class is to provide specific information. In an active learning classroom, however, the emphasis is on applying critical thinking and analytical skills to course content. This requires students to acquire more of the course content from their out-of-class studying.

Since active learning therefore requires a shift in the conception of what is to be accomplished during class time, teachers and students uncomfortable with such a perspective may be reluctant to embrace active learning. So, there are many obstacles to successfully implementing active learning methods in your teaching.

But, do not despair! Recognize the many benefits of active learning methods?a revitalization of your teaching and greater enjoyment and satisfaction of both you and your students. In the sections that follow, we present conceptual approaches?as well as specific concrete methods?to help you implement active learning experiences in your classroom.

How to Implement Active Learning?Conceptual Advice

1. Recognize that the goals of active learning differ from those of passive learning.Without recognizing such different goals, one can easily feel that active learning is not accomplishing what a classroom is ?supposed? to do.

Recognize that even in a lecture-based classroom, the mere fact that some words have been said does not necessarily mean that anything has been communicated. Understanding a concept often requires more than passively hearing it. Passive learning methods may ?cover? more material, but when students leave class it is unclear how much of the covered material they retain and understand. Active learning methods seek to target a smaller number of concepts, but students will leave class knowing information and understanding how they can use it.

2. Tell students what you are doing. Be open with students about what your teaching methods are going to be and what they are intended to accomplish. Do this often, beginning with a course syllabus and continuing with timely comments in class meetings throughout the course. If students know what they are expected to do and what they can expect from their teacher, they will be more willing and able to participate.
3. Direct and redirect class discussions. If you are going to seek class discussion, here are several suggestions for generating and continuing discussion while maintaining control and steering the conversation.

• Use good wait time (see #4).
• Use reflection to repeat aloud what a student says. This communicates to the students that you are listening to them, while making sure everyone in class heard what was said.
• Summarize each student?s comment as it occurs by writing a quick word or two on the blackboard or overhead transparency. Accept student comments whenever possible?you do not have to agree with everything that is said.
• Wait until several students have responded before you comment on the course of the discussion.
• After adding your comments, redirect the class discussion to focus on the particular comments that have hit the points you want students to consider further.
• Begin with general questions and move toward more specific ones. A good first question is a general brainstorming question, such as ?What do you see psychologists doing every day? Where do they work? What do they do??
• If students are reluctant to talk, have them write something first. For example, you may say, ?Write down one thing you think psychologists do, one place you think you might find them working.? After a few moments, ask for people to share something they wrote. A variation on this same idea is to collect anonymous written responses and randomly redistribute them. Students can then read aloud what another nameless person has written, a less stressful task than making their own comments.
• Use humor or drama to break the ice. You may want to begin a discussion by first showing a cartoon, overhead, or video, by reading a relevant newspaper item or case history, or by doing a fun class activity, such as the water gun classical conditioning activity in this Instructor?s Resource Manual (supplement 5.5).

4. Use wait time effectively. It is critical that you allow pauses of silence in the classroom to give students time to process and respond to what they are learning (Tobin, 1987).

Instructors are often uncomfortable with silence in the classroom. Indeed, part of the social norm of a classroom often includes an expectation that a teacher should be speaking, and thus silence feels like ?something is wrong.? But teachers and students need time to think?time to analyze and evaluate what has been said, time to generate questions or comments. Consider, for example, what is happening when an instructor asks, ?Are there any questions about this notion of cerebral asymmetry?? It is unlikely that students will immediately ask a question that has already occurred to them; students generallyneed time to think through what has been covered in the last few minutes of class, to pull together ideas, consider their reactions, discover what they want to ask, and formulate how they want to ask it. Good wait time can be enhanced with two very important and simple techniques.

• After asking a question of the class, silently count to five and look left and right across the room before saying anything at all. Be aware that this can be uncomfortable for the uninitiated, which includes even some very experienced instructors. [Research shows that the average college instructor barely pauses at all after asking a question (Tobin, 1987).]
• Take the time to frequently write on the blackboard or overhead transparency. This allows a momentary ?suspension? in the discourse and gives students silence in which to think and process information.

5. Manage risk. Different types of active learning involve different degrees of risk. Consider the level of risk you are comfortable with and select strategies that fit your comfort level. Bonwell (1995) has summarized what high-risk and low-risk teaching strategies entail, as follows:

Dimension	Low-Risk Strategy	High-Risk Strategy
class time planning structure subject matter controversy	relatively short careful highly structured relatively concrete low	relatively lengthy spontaneous less structured relatively abstract high

Low-Risk Strategies (listed from most active to most passive)

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small-group discussions
surveys or questionnaires
laboratory exercises
self-assessment activities
brainstorming activities
in-class writing
field trips
lecture with discussion
lecture with pause procedure
show a film for the entire session
lecture for the entire session

High-Risk Strategies (listed from most active to most passive)

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role-playing activities
small-group presentations
individual student presentations
small-group discussions
invite a guest lecturer of known quality
invite a guest lecturer of unknown quality

How to Implement Active Learning?Concrete Suggestions

1. Begin class by asking students to briefly write a summary of what was covered in the last class. Ask students to share what they have written or ask questions about what they have written.
2. Ask students to identify one question from the assigned reading that they would like to have addressed (in class today/on the topic we?re now turning to).
3. Ask students to predict what issues will be explored (in class today/on the topic we?re now turning to).
4. Ask students to write down a comment they have about what will be covered (in class today/on the topic we?re now turning to) and then have students share and discuss their responses with the person sitting next to them for a few minutes.
5. Use a ?jigsaw? technique (Hauserman, 1992) to facilitate small-group activities. In this method, each group member has some information in common with others, but each member also has some information that no one else has. Thus, the group?s problem-solving task requires that everyone works together.
6. Precede a discussion by asking students to write down ?1? if they agree with a stimulus statement, ?2? if they disagree, or ?3? if they are unsure. Then ask students to describe and defend their reactions.
7. Put a question from an old test on an overhead transparency and display it after relevant concepts have been covered in class. Ask students to respond to the question, explain the reasoning behind a response, or predict potential difficulties people might have in answering the question.
8. Periodically stop and ask students to take two minutes to summarize what has been said in class since the last such pause. Then ask students to take a minute to share their responses with the person sitting next to them.
9. Ask students to take two minutes to write a test question similar to those you use on your tests or quizzes. Then ask students to take a minute to ask the person sitting next to them to answer and critique the question.
10. Break the class into small groups and ask each group to come up with an activity, exercise, or demonstration that could have been used to illustrate a concept covered in the day?s class.
11. Toward the end of class, have students write down a short description of an alternative way the material in the day?s class could have been presented. Ask students to present and discuss their responses.
12. Ask students to write down a question about the day?s class and exchange it with the person sitting next to them to bring to the next class meeting.
13. In the last five to ten minutes of class, have students look at the notes taken by the person sitting next to them. Ask each student to identify something in the other person?s notes that he or she did not include in his or her own notes, or that he or she finds surprising or interesting.
14. Toward the end of class, have students decide which learning objectives from their study guide were addressed in the day?s class meeting.
15. Ask students to write down an example from their personal life that illustrates a concept covered in the day?s class.

References and Resources
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