Active learning and Active teaching
A young professor wrote to me: “The role of a professor is to teach in class. If you allow students to spend class time to discuss among themselves then what do you teach? How can you consider active learning when you are passively teaching or not teaching much?
Answer: It is easy to be cynical about the active learning method. I believe in class discussion because it is the students who are actively learning by participate in it. Today most students are dynamic, they do not like to sit quiet and listen to what professors say. By having an active discussion in class, you encourage them to share their understanding with each other. By having discussion students can challenge certain ideas, both of their own and others to arrive at a complete understanding of the topic. By listening to others, they can develop new ideas or using the ideas of others to improve their own thinking. By listening to different ideas among others, they can enrich their knowledge by understand several different viewpoints and see the total ideas rather than just a part of it. They can validate their own and making sure that their understanding was correct and that they were learning the right things.”
Of course, not every student or professor see the potential for learning through discussion. Some students believe it is something that professors ask them to do because the professor is lazy or not prepare the lecture well enough. Some professors believe active learning via discussion is a waste of their time since they must lecture in class. If you ask students whether they want to participate in class discussion or prefer to listen to professor to lecture then the answer is obvious. Most students would say they want professor to lecture because they will not have to do anything. They do not have to read materials before coming to class. They do not have to understand the materials. They do not have to prepare before class as they wait for the professor to tell them something that they may learn or may not. We have been doing this for hundred years and nothing has changed since then.
To make active learning works; to make class discussion works, you will need to explain the approach to them and tell them why discussing ideas will make them easier to learn. As professor, you have to actively listen to the discussion to monitor students' understanding of the topics and make correction if needed. This is NOT passive but active teaching. In the end, you can reinforce the learning that has occurred during the discussion by summarize the key points and ask students to write notes about important ideas that happened during the class discussion. You can validate the learning results by asking them to repeat what they have learned in the next class or you may want to mention about something interesting that students said in the next day.
The goal of active learning is for students to learn via the exchanges of information where they play an active role. As professors, we listen and take notes of what students discuss so we know whether they understand the materials or not. That is not passive, but active teaching. You also learn more about the topics as you listen to students, sometime they may have ideas that you have not even thought about.
For many years, I have seen students sleep, sending emails, writing text messages, checking websites, surf the net, or listen to music using earphones during the class lecture. Professors continue to lecture and students continue do whatever they do and the learning outcomes are questionable. With class discussion, the students are all actively involved in the listening, participating, discussing where no one doing anything else but learning as the professor is walking around the class actively encouraging students to learn more.
However, it is a choice that each professor has to make on how they want to approach their classroom teaching and what method they want to use.
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
