EDU 776 Blog post #4: Active Learning

Students are the Leaders of their Learning

When I think about active learning, “active” is the word I focus on.  Active learning is not a new concept to me, but it’s one I recently learned even more about.  Active learning doesn’t necessarily mean students are physically active while learning, (although they certainly could be, and that’s one type of it!) but rather, they have active involvement in their learning.  Active learning is student-centered, interest based, involves a lot of peer to peer interaction, and the teacher is a facilitator of student ideas instead of teacher ideas.  It takes quality and intentional planning from educators, but it produces quality and intentional work from students.  Best of all, it’s the most engaging type of learning, and leads to very high student retention of material.

Diving into an Example

I chose to explore "A Year in Six Words" as an example of active learning.  I wanted to check out this example because it immediately reminded me of doing a similar assignment in my College Writing class in High School, where we summed up our Senior year in six words.  I don’t remember what mine were, but I remember how much I enjoyed the assignment, and how much time I spent thinking of the perfect phrase, meticulously selecting each word. The fact that I even remember the assignment, from almost fifteen years ago, shows how much it stayed with me. 

I loved viewing the recent example from elementary school students reflecting on their year. Here’s a Padlet I made about my view of the lesson.

You can also view this screenshot from my Padlet.

Image Source: Personal Photo created via Padlet

Staying Active 

Checking out an example of an active learning activity made me reflect on active learning experiences in my own classroom.  I came to the conclusion that it’s something I do often, but inconsistently, though.  There are units I’ve created where almost the whole unit is made up of active learning experiences, and then others where I realize I’m not offering a lot of those opportunities to students at all.  I think the key to having a classroom that has a lot of active learning going on is just a lot of small, intentional changes to lessons, and doing that often.  That’s something I want to work towards to make sure the active learning experience in my classroom is consistent.