Belated Post on Active Learning

Back at the end of September, I attended a workshop lead by Charles Bonwell along with other members of the class. The weight of work kept pressing this post into the background, but I think even now there is a good deal of relevancy to our current discussions in class, especially last week.

There are a few things I want to say about active learning itself; Tatiana did a good job summarizing a lot of the major points Prof. Bonwell made at the workshop though so I won't spend a lot of time on this, because there is something else I'd like to explore. First, for those who aren't familiar, active learning is a learning mode that engages students in activities, discussions, and other forms of participation--in contrast to to listening to a lecture and perhaps asking questions by raising ones hand. Prof. Bonwell himself had been a history teacher, and near the beginning of the lecture he noted that bringing active learning into the classroom did not mean relegating more "passive" lecture like modes of learning to the past. Some topics are better delivered via lectures and sometimes other constraints like time may play a factor into whether active or "passive" learning may be used. He also asked attendees for examples or suggestions for active learning exercises. A number of different things were brought up like small group activities or question and answer sessions, but other interesting ones I hadn't considered before came up like role playing. We were then asked to split into groups and discuss some methods we might employ. Thinking about the many roles an engineer may potentially take, and how there is a push for including more direct educational experiences about this future workplace reality, I talked about having an exercise where my fictional engineering students would break into groups and take on different stakeholder roles in an engineering project. Given some background information on how each stakeholder may operate during an engineering project, the group could interact with itself about some fictional project. Not only would students benefit from taking on roles other than engineers, they would be able to see others acting out various roles, a faint ersatz of what they may later encounter if they enter industry. Perhaps this sounds far fetched but I found the prospect of such an activity intriguing.

That was supposed to be a short point, however clearly that goal was lost. Nevertheless, something else that really interested me about the presentation was how Prof. Bonwell actually ran the presentation. In a post not too long ago I talked about a professional development meeting I attended that was essentially a passive lecture to a captive audience. Of course this audience, for Prof. Bonwell's talk, selected to go, but the organization of the presentation was very different. From the beginning we were involved in different activities. At first he asked us to talk with our neighbors about why we attended. Then he asked the whole room for suggestions on what we wanted to learn. Here he did something interesting. He listed our various interests and talked about them, but then also went to highlight some things he thought were important about active learning, and he later went on to talk about those. I didn't realize it at the time, but in reflecting it seems he pulled a risky "teaching" move by allowing input from the "students" while still suggesting what content or topics we should cover. I don't know how much he changed what he presented from our input, he did address some points quite explicitly, but he also seemed to want to hit some major ideas about active learning. In fact later on we discussed in small groups and then "reported out" major roadblocks to the incorporation of active learning in the classroom. One of the major issues that he brought up and we discussed was the problem of teachers feeling like they had to give up part of their authority if they engaged in active learning. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is up for debate. But this incident where he asked for input but gently pushed us in a somewhat different direction (which he did at another time as well) seemed to show, intentionally or not (my guess is it was intentional, just not explicit) how a teacher can make a class more active without completing "giving" the class to the student body present.

There is a lot more I could talk about the style of the presentation, but I wanted to contrast this presentation with the professional development presentation I went to that I mentioned earlier. As the reader might guess, I found the presentation by Prof. Bonwell more engaging. But I think the point made above--about balancing active learning and passive learning--and his own discussion about working active learning in different ways provide a counterpoint to my own argument in my last post. To summarize very briefly, I noted given the constraints on professors in terms of time, they may resist changing teaching practices merely out of practical reasons. I think Prof. Bonwell makes a case that even small changes can be made to the more common modes of teaching that will make the classroom more engaging for students--it doesn't require the very detailed set of activities he set up for his own presentation that day. So while practicality may get in the way when for instance a teacher has no time to design a very active learning oriented presentation, practicality may also be used to keep that presentation from being completely passive by looking for small ways to engage students and make the presentation, lecture, or class a stronger, more involved learning experience.