What is Active Learning?
“Active Learning works not only because it helps motivation and feedback but also because
active learners are more likely to be attentive and to be thinking about the topic, relating new
knowledge to previous learning and elaborating the implications of what they have learned.”
Mc Keachie (1994)
What is it?
Active learning is an umbrella term for the use of methodologies and strategies that actively
involve students in the learning process. Active Learning places the responsibility for
learning on the learner.
Active Learning requires more than a student simply listening as a teacher explains an aspect
of their subject’s content although there is obviously room for this as well. As active learners
students must also read, write, discuss and/ or be engaged in solving problems during lessons.
Most importantly, to be active while reading, writing, speaking and listening students should
also be engaging in higher-order thinking tasks such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
What is the connection between Active Learning and Literacy?
What is the purpose of any reading and writing we do in class? According to Brozo and
Simpson: “The major goal of education should be the development of critical thinkers and
active learners who can use the literacy processes to pursue knowledge and solve problems”
(Brozo and Simpson, 2003).
Do we ever expect or give students’ the opportunity to learn new things from reading
material they meet in class? Again, Brozo and Simpson (2003) tell us that students choose not
to read when they realise that their teachers will provide them with the necessary course
information in the form of lectures, discussions, review sheets, or outlines that they can
download from websites. In these cases the students are simply passive receptors of
information as opposed to active participants in the learning process.
Similarly, we need to ask what the purposes of writing activities set in class are. Are they
simple recall activities with only one right answer or do we devise tasks that give students
opportunities to analyse and evaluate and to solve problems in different ways?
What might active learning in literacy involve?
From a teacher’s perspective, active learning is about devising instructional activities that
involve students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing.
Five important principles that characterise active learners as readers across all content areas
are outlined below:
1.
Active Learners use prior knowledge as they interact with a text.
2.
Active Learners summarize and organise as they interact with a text
3.
Active Learners think critically about a text and create their own elaborations
4.
Active Learners are metacognitively aware
5.
Active Learners possess and employ a wide range of reading and learning
strategies.
What can a teacher do?
In order for students to become active learners teachers must create supportive learning
environments.
Teachers need to actively promote independent learning (we don’t always have to supply
the answers. Let the students find them for themselves) within a classroom context that is
inviting, engaging and nurturing of students’ risk taking.
Explicit modelling of strategic behaviour you would like the students to emulate is also a
necessary component. The purpose of this would be to enable students to replicate these
strategies independently.
Teachers need to consider the tasks they are setting students and ensure that they provide
students with challenging and diverse tasks that enable them to think critically and
elaboratively. See notes on challenging learning here….
Teachers should keep the five principles outlined above in mind when providing reading
material for students and build a repertoire of strategies to help them to enact these
principles in their own lessons. For information on active reading strategies please see here.
Reference: “Readers, teachers, learners: expanding literacy in secondary schools” William G.
Brozo and Michele L. Simpson