Active Learning

Source: https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/active-learning Parent: https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/

When students are active participants during class, they are far more likely to retain and apply what they learn. When students work in pairs or small groups, pose questions, and share diverse perspectives, active learning also helps deepen knowledge and build peer relationships that might not have formed outside the course context. Structured group activities can also create more frequent and transparent opportunities to assess and grade in-class participation, giving instructors clearer insight into student understanding.

As David Gooblar says in The Missing Course,shift your planning from: “What am I going to cover today?” to “What are the students going to do today?”

Getting Started:

Interactive in-class activities can be incorporated into any course format to ensure that students are engaged in their learning, understanding the material, and retaining new information. Here are a few strategies instructors can easily implement into any kind of class:

• Short individual writing activities, such as “quick-writes,” “minute papers” or “exit tickets” can be used to take attendance, check student comprehension, poll student opinions, and encourage student synthesis and reflection.
• Having students talk to each other is an excellent way to incorporate participation, practice low-stakes problem solving, and encourage reflection. The Think-Pair-Share participation framework can be used in large lecture courses to encourage inter-student engagement, or in discussion courses as a low-stakes way to scaffold difficult conversations.
• Polling & asking questions are useful strategies for checking student comprehension and encouraging the expression of a wide range of perspectives, especially for high-enrollment courses. This can be done as simply as a show of hands, or anonymously using a range of Polling methods.

We recommend experimenting with a wide variety of exercises to keep a dynamic classroom. Additional strategies can be found on the Interactive In-Class Activities page. 

Next Steps:

Beyond single activities, below are some opportunities for making entire class meetings or even entire courses active:

• To get additional help or talk further about the techniques above or other active learning techniques, book a consultation with our classroom practice team.
• To convert a class session or your entire course to project- or problem-based learning, case-based learning, or flipped classroom, visit our self-service resources on these strategies and/or book a consultation with our classroom practice team.
• The Bok Center’s Learning Lab can work with you to reimagine and amplify active learning in your course. Our intergenerational team supports the design and facilitation of in-class activities and assignments that align your pedagogical goals with innovative multimodal approaches, including video, audio, vibe coding, and more yet to be discovered in collaboration with you!
• The ABL-Connect Active Learning Resource Repository can be mined for other strategies for high-participation classrooms, including: classroom debates, role play or simulations, hackathons.

For More Information:

Many of the larger scale studies on active learning have been conducted in STEM disciplines, although it is reasonable to expect that the benefits of active learning extend to any field.  A 2014 meta-analysis of 225 research studies in STEM classes found that students in classes with active learning performed 6% better on exams than students in classes with traditional lecturing, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than in classes with active learning (Freeman et al, 2014).  Additionally, active learning has been shown to decrease the achievement gap for underrepresented minorities and first generation college students (Theobald et al, 2020). In a study conducted at Harvard, Deslauriers et al. (2019) show that active learning leads to significantly greater course performance than high-quality traditional lectures, even when students perceive they are learning less.

For more information...

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Bain, K. 2004. What the best college teachers do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (2012). Discussion As a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. Chicago, IL: John Wiley & Sons.

Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (2016). The Discussion Book: 50 Great Ways to Get People Talking. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, 1st Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Handelsman, J., Miller, S., & Pfund, C. 2007. Scientific teaching. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Lang, J. (2010). On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching, 1st Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lang, J. (2016). Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Millis, B. J. 1990. Helping faculty build learning communities through cooperative groups. Available:http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/podimproveacad/202/ [2017, August 31].