- [Narrator] What is active learning?
Active learning is a farewell to the traditional lecture.
No more standing at a lectern dispensing wisdom in
120-minute snooze inducing soliloquies.
- [Professor] Anyone? Anyone?
- [Narrator] The most common belief about active learning
is that it's all about students using
class time to do things, not hear about them.
But active learning is much more than that.
At its core, active learning is about creating a continuous
feedback loop between professors and students.
Feedback professors use to understand how well their
students have understood and mastered the material.
The result, from a professor's perspective,
can be less time spent lecturing,
and more time spent coaching, facilitating
and bringing concepts to life.
Reams of research have shown that active learning
teaching methods are more effective at improving students'
success than traditional teaching methods that involve
passive learning.
In fact, students are 1.5 times more likely to fail
in traditional lecture format classrooms than
in an active learning classroom.
Students in active learning classrooms outperform students
in lecture classrooms by six percentage points
on the same exams.
Which can mean the difference between passing and failing.
And professors who have implemented active learning
see an increased ability and willingness for students to
participate in class, and do their readings,
as well as increased motivation.
Ultimately they see better learning outcomes,
and isn't that the goal?
Whose idea was it anyway?
The modern concept of active learning first surfaced
in 1991 when historian Charles Bonwell,
and psychologist James Eison laid out the first academic
case for transforming lecture based learning
into something better.
In their book Active Learning: Creating Excitement
in the Classroom, they argued that teaching should be less
about bestowing information on students,
and more about developing skills.
By encouraging higher order thinking through reading
or writing about the task at hand,
or by vigorously discussing it as a group,
knowledge can take hold in the students' own minds.
The idea goes back 2,000 years to Socrates.
The Socratic method of teaching was all
about continuous feedback.
About asking students questions,
and using their feedback to gauge their knowledge.
But, somewhere along the line,
higher education moved off of this path.
As university became something for the masses,
and enrollment swelled, it was no longer possible
or economically feasible to teach in an interactive,
feedback driven way.
Sorry Socrates.
With the exception of small, upper level seminar courses,
teaching became lecturing.
A one-way conversation.
Feedback from professors was reduced to once or
twice a semester, with little
or no opportunity for creating regular,
ongoing feedback between students and faculty.
Why isn't everyone using active learning?
The short answer, it's really challenging to implement
at scale.
From redesigning a classroom to better facilitate
student interaction, to making course content interactive,
and engaging, putting active learning strategies into motion
can be incredibly time- and work-intensive.
And that's simply not a luxury professors have.
It's not easy to move from static course materials
to dynamic content.
Finding great interactive content can be challenging,
leaving professors to search the web for resources,
or create their own,
which is even more time- and energy-consuming.
Large class sizes make it nearly impossible to implement
active learning.
In fact, we create the very environment active learning
is meant to eliminate.
Students become anonymous.
So they don't hold themselves accountable
for their learning.
And distraction and disengagement run rampant.
Consider the stats.
92% of students send text messages during class.
Only 54% of students report that they do their readings
on a regular basis.
The average attention span of students is eight seconds.
Down from 12 seconds in the year 2000.
Ironically, personal technology,
the very thing that many professors blame for increased
student distraction,
is a key reason why active learning is now on the rise.
Thanks to technology, it's never been easier to implement
active learning.
Today, virtually every student enters the classroom
with an internet connected smart phone in their hands.
By harnessing that technology, we've been able to recreate,
and even improve upon, the classroom of 2,000 years ago.
Active learning has never been easier to implement.
With the right technology,
professors can now know who has done the reading,
what they understood, and where they had challenges,
before students even set foot in the classroom.
Once class begins, professors can more easily flip
the classroom.
Moving from one-way lectures to group discussions around
concepts they already know students had
the most challenges with.
In larger classrooms, they can easily see who's there,
and how much they've been participating.
They can easily process student feedback,
and course correct their own discussion points in real time.
When it comes to assigned homework,
they can target areas that they know students had trouble
with in that class that day.
Technology has enabled the Socratic method to work at scale.
Sounds like it's time to start active teaching.
In the quarter century since Bonwell and Eison's active
learning book was published,
a movement has emerged from its pages.
A vast network of evangelizers whose mission is to help
professors switch from passive to active classrooms,
and keep abreast of the latest research on teaching
and learning.
They're everywhere.
Nearly every college in North America has a teaching
and learning resource center,
to support faculty in the transition
to new teaching methods.
Organizations dedicated to teaching reform have flourished.
From the membership based HASTAC to The Faculty Guild.
Still, many professors have resisted this change.
Do you really want to be one of them?