This morning (which happens to be a Sunday) begins for me as most do (and I’ve referred to this in an earlier post): I make coffee
and sit down for a quick review of the international and national news (BBC, NPR, and ESPN–go Twins!).
I also typically check the digital updates from The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, two of the most recognized news sources of information in higher education. The dailies offer summaries of recent news in higher ed (e.g., debates about the impact of donor influence, the role of Big Data and AI, the recent admissions scandals, trends in business that impact undergraduate education, and job opportunities). The publications also summarize recent research in higher education–particularly academic articles from the learning sciences, those areas of research that investigate whether, how, and to what degree particular approaches to teaching impact student learning. In other words, these studies test whether particular instructions practices actually improve student learning.
Photo by Jo McCulty
The Ohio State University
One recent article cited a study on active learning by a research team at Harvard led by Louis Deslauriers in the Department of Physics. (Physicists, it turns out, are among the faculty most interested in studying the impact of classroom practices on student learning. Carl Weiman at Stanford is among them. And he’s a Nobel Prize recipient!)
The Delaueriers study, “Measuring Actual Learning Versus a Feeling of Learning in Response to Being Actively Engaged in the Classoom,” showed that students learned more in a physics class that employed active learning than in class using a lecture-based approach.
However, students perceived that they learned less in the active classroom.
Article Summary
The researchers attribute this dissonance to a couple of factors–including the feeling that because engaging in active learning takes more cognitive effort (you have to think about the doing of active learning while you’re doing it), it may seem that–because effort is going to the act of learning–that you have less capacity to “get” the content.
As I read the article, I was reminded of the work of Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who posited two forms of pedagogy: banking and problem-posing. In “The Banking Concept of Education,” Freire presents the two forms. The banking concept assumes that instructors “deposit” information into the minds of their students (much as we deposit money into a bank account). The problem-posing approach assumes not an inert bottle (mind) to be filled but a mind to be engaged in its own development. In fact, Freire argues that the “teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself [sic] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (5). It’s that same joint engagement in learning that informs STEP. The program is intended to engage all of us–students and faculty alike–in the processes of learning and consciousness raising.
So, I hope you don’t mind a bit of reflection on learning and teaching. What I’d like you to take away from this post are two things: (1) If you’re in a classroom that asks you to engage in active learning practices, (a) engage! and (b) know that you’re likely taking away greater understanding than you think you are, and (2) consider yourself a partner in your learning–share the heavy lifting!