Is Active Learning Always Effective?

Active Learning That Distracts from Learning

By: Adriana J. LaGier, PhD

Because I teach mixed demographic courses, I often look out at a sea of distracted and unmotivated faces. Motivation is a large part of learning (Pintrich and deGroot, 2003). So, I use active learning activities, such as think-pair-share, to not only motivate students (Marbach-Ad et al., 2001), but also to enhance student learning (Bonwell and Eison, 1919; Freeman et al., 2014). If I’m being honest, active learning also has the added perk of distracting students from the monotony of my voice. Yet, in the past few years, I have begun to wonder if I have taken it too far? Am I simply using active learning as a way of keeping bored students active?

Recently, I created a set of tactile active learning activities developed to capture my kinesthetic learners. These activities range from using balloons to work on why cells are small to playing with PVC pipes to feel the rigidity of a microtubule.

I have been happily entering the classroom with my tactile-inspired kits being absolutely certain that I would engage students and enhance their learning. However, I have noticed a rather curious and alarming trend.  When I implement my kinesthetic activities, more students are missing the corresponding test question. For example, on one particular question about cell size, when I used my balloon activity, I went from 53 ± 3% students getting it right to 35 ± 4% students getting it right. So instead of capturing more students, I lost upwards of 15% of them.

This led me to ask the question: in my attempt to capture and motivate students, am I distracting them from learning? I feel that I use active learning appropriately because I align learning activities with well-constructed learning goals and/or critical inquiry ideals. Therefore, I believe that I am engaging unmotivated students rather than simply keeping them busy. However, I do wonder if by engaging them in the activity, I am taking their attention away from learning the content.

Noticing this trend in my assessment outcomes has been eye-opening. For now, I watch for activities that are negatively impacting student success on assessments. When I notice that the activity distracts from student learning, I dial back on the active learning and work on capturing student attention prior to teaching them the content. Based on this experience, I continuously remind myself that engaging students doesn’t always mean that the engagement is useful for learning the material at hand. In my attempt to have an enjoyable, maybe even fun, class, I may be sacrificing student attention and learning.

References:

Bonwell, C. C., and J.A. Eison. 1991. Active learning: creating excitement in the classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1, Washington, D.C.: The George Washington University, School of Education and Human Development.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S.L., McDonough, M., Smith, M.K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., and M.P. Wenderoth. 2014. Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 8410-8415.

Marbach-Ad G., Seal O. and P. Sokolove. 2001. Student attitudes and recommendations on active learning: a student-led survey gauging course effectiveness. J. Coll. Sci. Teach, 30, 434–438.

Pintrich P.R. and E.V. De Groot. 2003. A Motivational Science Perspective on the Role of Student Motivation in Learning and Teaching Contexts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 667-686.

Adriana LaGier is associate professor of biology at Grand View University.

Best teachers

What Makes a Good Teacher?

You may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as your favorite teacher — the key is to try

By Rob Jenkins

Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle

 

 

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a column on "The 4 Properties of Powerful Teachers," and named "personality" as one of those qualities. While recognizing that everyone is different, and that personality isn’t necessarily something we can control, I was attempting to identify key characteristics that most of my best teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, had in common.

When I say "best teachers," I’m not just talking about the ones I liked best. I mean the teachers who had the greatest influence on me — the ones whose names I still remember to this day, even though in some cases it’s been more than 40 years since I sat in their classrooms. They are people I’ve tried to emulate in my own teaching.

What made them good teachers? I can’t offer any empirical answers to that question, but I do know that personality was a key factor in all of them. Perhaps we can measure effectiveness in the classroom, to some extent, but how do we really determine quality? It seems to me that we’ve been trying for years, through various evaluation metrics, without a whole lot of success. I’ve known some bad teachers who were able to manipulate the metrics, and some good ones whose excellence wasn’t immediately apparent on paper.

 

We may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as our favorite teachers. But simply by recognizing those traits as desirable, we can become more approachable, creative, and, yes, funnier than we would be otherwise.

 

In any case, the following observations are based entirely on my own experiences as a student, professor, and former midlevel administrator who has seen many good teachers (and a few bad ones) practice their craft. My hope is that, even if this list is somewhat subjective — not to mention incomplete — it won’t seem entirely unfamiliar. 

 
They are good-natured. The best teachers tend to be approachable, as opposed to sour and forbidding. Grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic curmudgeons can sometimes make effective teachers, too, if for no other reason than that they prepare us for grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic bosses. I had some grouchy teachers myself, especially in graduate school, and learning to cope with them was a valuable experience I would not wish to deny anyone. But most of my very best teachers were pretty easy to get along with — as long as I paid attention in class and did my work.

They are professional without being aloof. Most academics tend to keep students at arm’s length — the obvious message being, "I’m your teacher, not your friend." Clearly, professionalism requires a certain amount of boundary-setting, which can be difficult, especially when dealing with older students, where the age gap is often not all that wide and, under different circumstances, they might actually be your friends. My best teachers always seemed to effortlessly walk that very fine line between being an authority figure and being someone I felt I could talk to. I didn’t even understand what they were doing — or how difficult it was — until I had to do it myself years later.

They have a good sense of humor. They may or may not be ready for the Improv, but they don’t take themselves or their subject matter too seriously. Few things are more off-putting than faculty members who think they’re much smarter than anyone else in the room (or any room) — unless it’s those who think their subject is the most important of all and expect students to feel the same way, other classes be damned. My best teachers not only understood that their course was just one of several we were taking, but also had a great, self-deprecating wit, often making jokes at their own expense and even sometimes making light of their subject. Funny how an ounce of humor can sometimes help students grasp the material better than a pound of gravitas. 

 
They seem to enjoy what they do. Some faculty members don’t really like students. They are the academics who constantly whine about their workload and complain about how rude or unprepared their students are. I’ve often wondered: Why are such people even in this profession? What did they expect? The teachers I remember as the very best were those who clearly loved teaching and got a kick out of associating with students every day. After all, no one wants to feel like a nuisance, which is exactly how some teachers make their students feel.

They are demanding without being unkind. Some academics take great pride in being disliked, wearing their unpopularity like a badge of honor. They naturally assume it’s because they’re so "tough" and "rigorous," reasoning that lazy students dislike rigor and transfer their dislike to the people who demand it. In my experience, however, most students want to be challenged; they don’t mind if a lot is expected of them. They just don’t want their professors to be jerks or insufferable know-it-alls. My best teachers were demanding without being mean-spirited.

They seem comfortable in their own skin. Perhaps one reason students tend to like these faculty is that they like themselves, without being in love with the sound of their own voices. This is related to not taking themselves too seriously, but it goes beyond that. The root cause of bad teaching is a fundamental lack of self-confidence, leading teachers to overcompensate by being unreasonably demanding, aloof, or condescending to students. Paradoxically, professors who appear arrogant and narcissistic are often trying to cover up what they perceive as profound deficiencies in their own personalities and abilities. The best teachers are confident without being arrogant, authoritative without being condescending.

They are tremendously creative. They are always willing to entertain new ideas or try new things — sometimes even on the fly. "Innovation" is a buzzword nowadays, but the term seems applied almost exclusively to the use of technology. My best teachers, though, were truly innovative, coming up with creative ways — sometimes on the spur of the moment — to help us understand, internalize, and remember what they were trying to teach. What made those teachers innovative was not tools or technology but their minds.

They make teaching look easy. We all know it isn’t. Ultimately, great teachers are like great athletes, dancers, or musicians. We may know, cognitively, that what they do isn’t easy, but they seem to do it so effortlessly that we’re lulled into thinking it’s no big deal — until we try it ourselves. Then we learn quickly just how difficult it is to play a sport or an instrument — or teach — at a very high level. I didn’t fully appreciate that until I became a teacher myself and discovered how easy it is to fall short in the classroom.

Most of these things I’ve mentioned here are personality facets. We can’t control whether or not we have them or to what degree. No doubt, there is some truth to the idea that certain people are just born teachers because they happen to be blessed with these traits in abundance.

At the same time, even if we are not "born teachers," we can work to develop the qualities of those teachers in ourselves. We may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as our favorite teachers. But simply by recognizing those traits as desirable, by acknowledging that we don’t possess them to the degree we would like, and by committing ourselves to working on those areas, we can become more approachable, creative, and, yes, funnier than we would be otherwise. It’s the journey of self-improvement that makes the difference.

* Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University and author of Building a Career in America’s Community Colleges. He writes monthly for our community-college column and blogs for Vitae. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his employer. You can follow Rob on Twitter @HigherEdSpeak.

SOAR

Making the Most of Your Writing Feedback

Giving high-quality feedback on student writing can be a challenge, but these strategies help maximize its impact on your students.

 

By Susan Barber

 

 

Photo: ©Gable Denims/500px

Providing feedback on student writing is one of the most important, most challenging aspects of a teacher’s job. It’s important because feedback is critical to student learning; it’s challenging because of time constraints and the number of students at varying levels in our classes.

Making sure your feedback is specific, ongoing, action-oriented, and reasonable—the SOAR method, a strategy I developed—helps maximize its impact on your students.

Specific

Feedback is often lost on students because it’s too vague. Comments like “great job,” “good writing,” or even “needs better organization” fall flat with students because they’re not tied to specific words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs in writing.

Feedback falls into two categories: the what and the how. The what of writing deals with content. Specific feedback here includes guiding students if they need more evidence, stronger claims, or further analysis. If they’re writing fiction, you might suggest adding more dialogue for character development or further detail to establish setting.

The how is the writing itself. Specific feedback here can include comments concerning the organization of the information, rhetorical strategies, style, voice, and conventions.

Teachers who teach writing across the curriculum and feel uncomfortable assessing the how can focus their feedback on the what since that is the part of the writing they’ll feel most comfortable assessing.

Ongoing

Fortunately, teachers are slowly breaking away from grading final products only and are offering feedback throughout the different stages of writing. The biggest hindrance to ongoing feedback is time, but narrowing the focus of the feedback can help you meet this challenge.

For example, a science teacher may choose to focus on one particular section of a lab report each time; an English language arts teacher may choose to focus on one particular stage of writing, shifting from one stage to another throughout the course of the year.

Students can take the lead by asking for feedback on a Google doc throughout the writing process. Kaizena allows teachers to leave voice notes on a student paper, making it easy to check in and comment on work during different stages in the process.

Stations with self-guiding questions for reflection can be a great way to allow students to move through the writing process at their own pace, and the teacher can rotate through the stations, addressing small groups of students instead of the whole class.

Action-Oriented

Many teachers fall into the trap of editing student writing by focusing on marking grammar mistakes instead of offering feedback to move students forward in their writing. Helping students take specific steps is key in building a growth mindset in writing—students must see that the action taken can benefit their future writing and not just correct a mistake in the current paper.

Conferring is key when offering action-oriented feedback. I recently sat in the hall conferring with students about college essays. This allowed me time to say things like, “Notice in this paragraph how you begin seven sentences with ‘I’ followed by an action verb. How can you vary some of these sentences so they don’t all sound the same? The content is good, but let’s work on sentence variety.” The student would then offer a suggestion on how to start a sentence differently, and we would further discuss it. The student not only improves this piece but will be more likely to carry these ideas to future writing because the feedback results in an action step.

Teachers are not the only ones who can provide action-oriented feedback—peer editing with specific action-oriented writing suggestions can also move your writers forward.

Reasonable

When a student receives a paper with markings all over it, they can become overwhelmed and discouraged, which often prevents them from taking proper steps for revision or for growth as a writer in general. This can be remedied in several ways.

Select a focus for feedback with each assignment. Sometimes I’ll tell students, “I’ll be offering feedback on transitions in this paper,” or “The focus of feedback for this writing is on the amount of evidence.” I try to give feedback on both the what and the how of writing. This is especially strategic if I’ve given a mini-lesson on an area that I want students to focus on in their writing.

Another successful strategy is giving a Glow and a Grow comment highlighting a specific area that a student did particularly well on and one that needs improvement. Glow and Grow comments both celebrate and challenge student writing. Students refer to past Grow and Glow comments and goals before writing future assignments so they can be reminded of where they are strong, in order to continue doing these things well, and to be aware of areas for growth, in order to push themselves in these areas.

Feedback is more than a grade and should be one of the driving factors in helping students set learning goals and take charge of their own writing and learning. Help students SOAR to success in learning with quality feedback.

Teaching is acting

All the Classroom’s a Stage

 

Sarah Rose Cavanagh 

 Hernán Piñera, Creative Commons

 

One crisp fall evening during my freshman year of college, I gathered up my courage and struck out across the campus to audition for my university’s amateur theater season. In performance after performance, I could tell I was pretty flat, and I could read an answering flatness in the eyes of the judges.

After a series of frustrating flops, a young woman popped out of one of the audition rooms and summoned three of us in. She announced that — rather than reading lines from a play — we would be doing improv.

Any form of acting involves vulnerability — of taking something earnest inside yourself and laying it bare in bright light, risking ridicule and rejection. But a script allows you some protection, at least. You didn’t generate the ideas, you only delivered them. In improv, however, it’s all you. Given only the sheerest of prompts, you share something of yourself with no chance to consider, prepare, or rehearse.

The director explained that she would give us one word and we’d act it out with whatever came to mind — words, movement, song. I took a deep, nervous breath.

"Hymen," she said.

I froze. I felt exposed, my face hot. But I also really, really wanted this part. So I closed my eyes. I summoned all of my deep, conflicted emotions and surrendered to them, without judgment or sense of propriety or shame. I became my feelings. And then I acted them out.

It was the only callback I received that day.

Teaching is acting. If you teach, you are acting. Like acting, your best performance will stem from tapping into your true emotions and connecting with your audience on an authentic level. But you are still crafting an act using speech, movement, and props — and laying it before a critical audience. Your highest hope isn’t that your students will approve, necessarily, but that they’ll be moved, or somehow changed intellectually and emotionally.

If you ask your students to participate in class activities or discussions, they, too, are acting. They are pulling ideas and words out of themselves, choosing different tones or stances, and putting all of that on display for your approval.

I was already intrigued by the intersections of teaching and acting when I ran across a recommendation by the psychologist Tom Stafford that all teachers read Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, a 1979 tome about teaching improv by the acting coach Keith Johnstone. Little did I know the book would forever change not only how I teach but also how I think about human interaction in general.

Lessons on status and vulnerability. Early on in Impro, Johnstone makes the claim that nearly every human interaction involves manipulating one’s status with reference to someone else — making yourself or the person you’re interacting with bigger or smaller, more or less important.

In the weeks after I read his book I saw people manipulating their status everywhere I looked. An older couple on the train squabbling over whose aches and pains were worse were jostling for status. In battles with my 10-year-old, I now saw an innately high-status creature eternally frustrated by the low status awarded her by virtue of childhood. Most heartbreakingly to me, a passing female undergraduate in the hall scoffed to a male one: "I have no idea how I got that A. Probably just lucky guessing."

Teachers, especially college professors, come with high status preinstalled. We sweep into the room with our Ph.D.s, our jargon, our mysterious notes to shuffle, and, of course, our ability to cast judgment on students in ways that could open or close doors to their desired futures.

Then we demand that they stretch out their tender necks and hazard guesses that might betray their ignorance or (worse) their shallowness or strangeness of thought. "The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea," Johnstone says, "but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited."

We ask students to risk all of that, not just in front of us, but also before their peers, who wield a different sort of status — the power to giggle or roll their eyes. "Laughter is a whip that keeps us in line," observes Johnstone.

Such pressures are present for every student. But just imagine how much heavier the burden for students who walk in already under a big spotlight due to their ethnicity, gender identity, or disability status. No wonder so many students risk getting docked a few participation points rather than lay their unadorned thoughts on the table to be scrutinized. To participate is to risk a lowering of one’s status.

What can professors do about that state of affairs? Johnstone suggests we intentionally lower our own status — make ourselves vulnerable. In his own classroom, he tells his theater students that if they fail, he is to blame, not them. It frees students from worrying about losing status if they do something wrong, and allows them to take risks.

A colleague of mine, Esteban Loustaunau, an associate professor of Spanish, adopted a similar tactic in his courses. Students often are leery of talking in the classroom, he says, because they believe they start the class with an A and anything they share could lower their grade. Cleverly, on the first day of class he tells them, "Right now, you are all failing this class." That simple reframe illustrates that what they say from that point on will not endanger their status but elevate it.

In Impro, Johnstone argues that it’s critically important for teachers to model self-disclosure in the classroom. Especially when you’re asking students to take creative risks, it does no good to simply reassure them that they aren’t going to be dinged for the content of those risks. A student needs "a teacher who is living proof that the monsters are not real, and that the imagination will not destroy you," Johnstone writes. "Otherwise the student will have to go on pretending to be dull."

The most dangerous phase — and how to avoid it. This past spring was one of the worst teaching semesters of my life. I was unable to get students to volunteer for critical class roles. They seemed resentful of assignments, and held me at an emotional remove. That experience, so different from most semesters, has honestly flummoxed me, particularly since it occurred during a semester in which I had a reduced teaching schedule (thanks to a grant) and thus more time to prepare and plan.

I stumbled onto a potential explanation in a work by Paul Kassel, an actor, a professor, and dean of the College of Visual & Performing Arts at Northern Illinois University. In his 2006 book, Acting: An Introduction to the Art and Craft of Playing, Kassel warns of the dangers of increasing competency. In delivering a highly polished presentation, you may have lost a critical energy — both your own vitality and your capacity to evoke an answering liveliness in your students.

When you have taught a class on a given topic 1,000 times before, all the decisions have been made, all the turning points smoothed over into polished curves. That’s a problem because it is just that moment of decision — what to do, what to say — that snags interest, that creates energy, that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat: "Once a decision is made the audience need not attend as closely, for decisions have inevitable consequences. Once someone jumps up, we all know they will come down. It is the deciding to jump that creates the suspense."

Having everything preplanned and running smoothly in the classroom also means you are high status again — you alone know what is coming next and how it will go.

It is scary to begin teaching a course that is completely untested, that is loosely prepared, and that is flexible to student input or to your own decision-making in the moment. But as Kevin Gannon, a professor of history and head of the teaching center at Grand View University, says in his teaching manifesto, "If I want my students to take risks and not be afraid to fail, then I need to take risks and not be afraid to fail."

Taking risks and trying new things also allows you to approach your teaching from a playful, lively perspective. I had forgotten the lesson I learned in my improv audition — that the best performances, the most moving and effective ones, stem from the raw, authentic energy you summon in the act of creating.

Consider what might happen if you release your hold on your high status, if you chance being earnest and vulnerable, if you strive to play.

Such is my plan for the fall.

Sarah Rose Cavanagh is an associate professor of psychology at Assumption College and associate director for grants and research at the college’s teaching center. Her book, The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion, was published in October.

Metodologias Ativas

VIII Fórum Nacional de Metodologias Ativas de Ensino-Aprendizagem na Formação em Saúde

Será realizado nos dias 3, 4 e 5 de novembro/2016, na Faculdades Pequeno Príncipe, em Curitiba, o VIII Fórum Nacional de Metodologias Ativas de Ensino-Aprendizagem na Formação em Saúde. As inscrições já estão abertas e poderão ser feitas através do site até o dia 25 de outubro. Podem se inscrever professores, pesquisadores, estudantes e dirigentes dos cursos de graduação e de pós-graduação em saúde.

Nos links que seguem abaixo, é possível conferir as informações gerais do evento, a programação preliminar e as normas para submissão e publicação de trabalhos.

http://faculdadespequenoprincipe.edu.br/forum/

Inscrições

Informações gerais

Programa preliminar

Normas de submissão e publicação de trabalhos

Large classes

Four Key Questions About Large Classes

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD

Here's a set of questions about large classes that I'm thinking we ought to be discussing more than we are.

1. How many students make it a large class? Teachers who do and don’t teach large classes have their opinions, but it’s not clear who has the right answer. Often faculty views seem related to the size of their college or university. I once consulted at a small liberal arts college where I was asked to sign a petition against classes enrolling more than 35 students. At about the same time, I saw a list of the 10 courses most often taken by beginning students at my R1 university. Only two—English composition and physical education—enrolled fewer than 30 students, and most had many more.

More important than faculty opinions are their perceptions. If you think it’s a large class, chances are good you’ll teach it that way. I’ve observed classes with 35 students being taught as if the enrollment were closer to 350, and I’ve seen very large classes that looked and felt like they were being taught to 30 students.

2. Who should be taking large classes? We know who typically takes them—students in their first two years of college. The largest classes at most institutions are introductory-level survey courses that fulfill general education requirements, gateway courses to majors, or first courses in a degree program. In those classes, beginning students often don’t know many or any of their classmates. These are the courses where the most lecturing occurs and where it’s very difficult for faculty to establish relationships with their students. How well do these courses meet the learning needs of beginning students? Do we ever we consider the possibility of offering a large class to more experienced students who might be better equipped to cope with these learning environments?

3. What content is best suited for delivery in a big class? Of course, that’s a question best answered by those who know the content. But I’m not sure it’s a question we ever discuss. Is it foundational material, those disciplinary building blocks? Is it material that students can master on their own without much teacher involvement? Is it content that’s not really up for discussion? Is there more of the kind of content that works in large classes in some fields than others?

4. Who should be teaching the large classes? At many institutions, these introductory or first major courses are traditionally considered less desirable teaching assignments. They are often handed over to the new or beginning faculty who then work their way up to teaching more highly prized courses, including those in their areas of specialty.

Large classes are more difficult to teach than small ones, especially if you’re committed to active learning, classroom interaction, assignments that develop skills like writing, and testing practices that promote thinking more than memorization. They’re also more difficult because the classroom management issues grow right along with class size. So, if these courses are more difficult to teach, should they be assigned to those new to teaching and/or to the institution?

Are they good places for adjunct, continuing contract faculty, or for teachers hired for the express purpose of teaching them? Some think large classes are the perfect venue for charismatic teachers, those who’ve mastered (and often relish) the performance aspects of teaching. These are teachers who keep students attentive, but how well do these dramatic styles promote deep learning and intellectual skill development?

I’m pretty solidly against big classes and the kinds of learning experiences they typically provide, but I’m also a realist, so this post is raising questions about the best ways to deal with them. Do we examine our use of large classes as critically and creatively as we should? A lot of what we do in higher education, we do because that’s what everyone else is doing. I think large classes are a case in point. They’re a fact of life in higher education, and their existence is not something most of us are in a position to change, but many decisions about how they’re taught are under our control. What we decide isn’t trivial. It impacts the learning experiences of large numbers of students.