Recently, a faculty member visiting from overseas posed this dilemma to me: The benefits of active learning are well known, but I only have six hours of time with my students and I have so much information to cover! How do I balance between the efficiency of lecture and the effectiveness of active learning? It’s a dilemma that also arises frequently for UC Davis faculty. Two possible solutions come to mind as I write this post.
First, if faculty have to transmit an entire body of knowledge in a short amount of time, it’s no wonder they are overwhelmed! But what if faculty were not constrained to that particular period of time for information transmission? Faculty who flip their classrooms are finding that they can rely on students to start learning the information before class–and then faculty can use the precious face-to-face time to work with students on processing and applying what they have learned, which is the fun and interesting part for both students and faculty. This works in classrooms of many sizes and fields. Here on the UC Davis campus, faculty have used the technique successfully in classes ranging from 50 to 500 students, for topics as diverse as art history, introductory biology, and applied engineering. I’ll be honest–it takes more work the first and probably second time to set up a classroom this way. But the benefits for student learning are impressive.
Second, active learning promotes more than just knowledge retention. It also promotes motivation. A memory comes to mind here: When I was taking masters classes in a program designed to prepare language teachers, I had one methods instructor who was first and foremost a French teacher. One day, she gave us a demonstration French lesson, in which she certainly had more content than she actually covered. Using pictures and inviting us to repeat after her, she led us through five nouns, four verbs, and some tricky pronunciation. Then she had us write captions for a short cartoon strip and read our captions aloud to each other. It was a short lesson, perhaps less than an hour, but years later I still remember the feeling of delight I had as I left the classroom. That day, it felt to me that French was within my grasp. Now before any French instructors leap to admonish me, I do acknowledge the years of practice and cultural adjustment that go into acquiring another language. My point is that students need moments like this in order to keep going. During some class session, students of many backgrounds need to feel that systems engineering, or linear algebra, or English composition, or marine biology is within their grasp. A well-placed, well-guided experience with active learning can provide the setting for such aha moments. Even if you see no way around lecturing for five of the six hours you have with students, it may be that the active learning experiences you use in the other hour effectively arouse the motivation students need to persevere with the rest of the learning.
What kinds of aha moments do you remember when you were first learning about your field? In what learning settings did they occur? Whether a brilliant lecture or an assignment driven by student inquiry, please share!