Classroom collaboration Teachers use active learning activites to engage students Lily Thomas
D
uring a recent economics class, senior Dane Cochran envisioned a pizza place in different types of economies. He had fun during the activity, as he found it both interesting and engaging. Activities like this can be classified as active learning. According to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Educational Innovation, active learning is an instructional approach that works to engage students in the learning process. Some examples of active learning activities include group work, case studies and debates. “I have found that hands-on and interactions with fellow students seems to really stick with students more,” world geography and sociology teacher Haley Beauchamp stated. “Having that conversation about a topic versus reading about it or having me talk at you, it may stick longer. It goes from the short-term memory and hits the long-term memory because there’s an experience with it.” Active learning is based on constructivism, a theory of learning that stresses the idea of constructing an understanding of a concept and continuing to build upon it. According to a research paper by the Cambridge Assessment International Education, as knowledge moves from short-term to long-term memory, it becomes associated with mental models called schemas. The goal of active learning involves engaging such schemas and continuing to use them during the learning process. There are several benefits of incorporating active learning. For example, as stated on Cornell University’s website, active
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learning builds self-esteem, gets students thinking about the material and creates a sense of community in the classroom. Studies by Northeastern University show that active learning activities are twice as effective at ingraining a conceptual understanding as opposed to more traditional methods such as lectures and taking notes. Furthermore, Scott Freeman and his colleagues at the University of Washington found in a study that students in traditional lecture classes were one and a half times more likely to fail their class than those in classes with active learning activities. “Right now my focus, just coming into this year and not being able to do things for a year and a half, is to get active,” Beauchamp said. “Engagement, students talking to each other, partners, groups, I definitely want to go for that as much as I can for as long as I can. At the same time, I’m tweaking what I normally do
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and always refreshing what I do in my classroom.” Some teachers have taken advantage of the benefits of active learning. In sociology, students played musical chairs in a way that demonstrated a sociological theory. In Spanish classes, sometimes the class gets in groups and holds competitions. In senior Ella Belsley’s zoology class, students filled out a dichotomous key by going around and examining different species in jars. Belsley found that physically seeing the animals rather than looking at a flat picture made it easier to understand the different specifications. “We all had to work together and problem-solve, then say what kind of different variations the animals had and look at them to find the variations,” Belsley said. While active learning works well for some, especially visual learners, there are also students who prefer traditional class activities such
“Right now my focus, just coming into this year and not being able to do things for a year and a half, is to get active,” Beauchamp said.
While taking a non-traditional partner test on Sept. 8, seniors Bryce Williams and Casey McLeod get clarification on a question from Haley Beauchump. Photo by Lily Thomas.
September 2021
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