Let's Get Active (Learning)!

 It’s so important to stay active, right? Every day we see commercials or ads on our favorite social media app touting the latest workout equipment, fitness channel, or the most comfortable pair of shoes to lace up for your next marathon (it’s literally like running on air!) If we go too long without hitting the treadmill, yoga mat, or even just a walk through our neighborhood, we can start to feel the effects in a number of different ways. Staying active helps maintain our overall health, both physically and mentally. In a similar fashion, staying active in learning can have major benefits for our students.

Active learning is a method of teaching and learning that, as the name suggests, asks students to take a more active role in their education. This is not about lecture and recitation. Instead, students are tasked with actually grappling with concepts and materials, taking a lead role in the classroom, while their teacher focuses on facilitating learning with consistent, targeted feedback that spurs on further research, creation, and/or reflection. Students regularly discover and apply new knowledge, and make connections between what they are learning/doing, and what they already know, especially through discussion or more ‘active’ activities. Students are able to display their learning in creative ways, especially through the use of technological tools, rather than preparing for a more traditional test or essay. The experiential aspect of active learning is what helps to create meaning, which in turn strengthens the personal connection that students feel to what they are doing in their classes. Active learning is something that teachers can and should seek to implement in their own classrooms, because it allows for students to work towards the same prescribed learning goals/standards in a curriculum, but doing so in a way that generates much more personal meaning.

One such example of active learning is described in this blog post; this Padlet provides a summary of the lesson:

Padlet

The activity described in the blog post saw students using apps like PicCollage and Audioboom to create visual products profiling important figures in the American Revolution. While it is not specifically made clear in the post, it seems that students had freedom to choose the topic of their project, and were given flexibility in terms of the design, layout, and creation of their project. A project such as this one exemplifies active learning because of that inclusion of student choice, as well as the fact that students were using 21st-century skills like creativity and collaboration in making their products. Students also included their own likenesses in several of the products, which I feel also speaks to students taking pride in their work, another hallmark of active learning. 

My Experience with Active Learning

Active learning is something that I have sought to include in my classroom for several years; in this earlier blog post, I wrote about my experience with project-based learning and Genius Hour, both of which are examples of active learning. To summarize for those who say TL;DR, I feel that Genius Hour, which requires students to compose an essential research question, research said question, and present their findings in whatever method they feel most fitting, is one of the best educational units I have ever implemented. The freedom that students are given, combined with the rigor of the research they undertake, creates such meaningful learning opportunities that more traditional strategies just don’t offer. I extended similar thinking to projects in other classes I have taught as well. Here are a couple of projects that former students of mine have created:

Rosa Parks video (project during unit on Civil Rights Movement in 8th-grade social studies)

Autism video (Genius Hour research project)

For those who haven’t experimented with active learning, I would highly recommend trying to incorporate it in your classroom. Start with the learning targets you have set for students. Then, think about ways in which students can show their progress in meeting said targets, while choosing how they do so. For example, students could create infographics, commercials, or other products to reflect research on a number of scientific topics (we’ve done this in my current school to wrap up a unit on geological processes). In math, students could compose products to demonstrate real-life examples of different mathematical concepts. There are really no limits to how teachers could implement active learning, so long as they are willing to lace up those shoes and give it a try!