Let’s Not Overthink Active Learning

Photo by Changbok Ko on Unsplash

The department chair of a first-year writing program I once worked at sat down with me and discussed his teaching strategies.

“I care more about what students are doing rather than learning. I rarely talk. Five minutes at the most. When your voice starts to hurt, you’ve been talking too much and need to stop.”

This launched him into a rant about lecturing and its outdated place in education, as expected. Even when professors try to be funny and relatable in their lectures, the department chair dismissed this as “infotainment.” He made his point clear: active learning is real teaching, and we all need to accept the death of the lecture.

“Sometimes, I assign group work and then walk out of the classroom,” he said.

But let’s be real here: most students have grown to be passive learners and need guidance. They’re not apathetic, but after the social disruption of COVID-19, we should not act surprised when Gen Z students just want to be told what to do and how to do it to succeed.

This shift in how Gen Z learns reflects the current world we live in. When we want information, we get it instantly through Google or ChatGPT. Imagine if we asked Google a question and then it spun that question into a think-pair-share lesson until we understood the answer ourselves. None of this is within a modern student’s wheelhouse, and the trend of some students cheating with AI-generated papers is proof of this. In short, only educators and administrators care about active learning.

Active learning is not a bad teaching method by any means, and it is clear that it is beneficial. However, once again, higher education is too concerned with immediately following buzzwords and trends instead of approaching them pragmatically. Whenever an administrator, Dean, or guest speaker comes and preaches to us about the life-changing magic of active learning and how students will love it in all of their classes, I wonder if they have ever tried getting students to engage with active learning. I’d rather get a root canal than try to facilitate a “students teach the class” activity where students groan, stay quiet, are on their phones, or are so anxious about the mere idea of communicating with others that they’re about to puke.

I understand why active learning is important: it builds interpersonal skills, gets students involved with each other, and leaves less work for the teacher. But I also follow the mantra of “teach the way you want to be taught.” Among the best professors I’ve ever had used active learning sparingly and smartly. Because my field of study was the humanities, I found myself learning the most through writing as well. This brings me to a stray observation: in many discussions and resources I have found on active learning, I find it odd how writing an academic essay is not listed as an active learning strategy. Surely, students are writing essays in classes outside of their required English courses. If the definition of active learning is supposed to be “students being in charge of their own learning,” then surely writing a paper falls into that category. We English professors are already assigning active learning assignments by this logic. Must we always shoehorn a Kahoot! on top of this?

Because of the reasons I’ve outlined above, I use active learning strategies sparingly, no more than one short in-class activity a week. The most I do is online polls, peer review, and small writing prompts. The rest of the time, I am lecturing, answering questions, and leaving students to read the textbook and write their papers, all while getting direct feedback from me. After four years of doing this, I have received nothing but glowing course evaluations. I have some students who go as far as to say that my teaching style was the best they’ve ever had. I’m not saying all of this to toot my horn. This should just be an example of how lecturing in writing courses can still work. While many colleges try to claim that there is a time and place for both lecturing and active learning, I find that hard to believe, given how many active learning strategies are touted rather than lecturing strategies. On that note, I’ll now show my lecturing strategies and how they are effective.

Talk to students, not at them. Even though I could be in a room of 25 or more students, I speak to the entire class as if I were speaking to each one individually. My colleague from earlier may dismiss this as “infotainment,” but students are more willing to listen when I crack jokes, share personal stories, and be at their level at all times. Sometimes, I let students speak up without raising their hand, as if having a natural conversation. Students act more like participants rather than passive information sponges this way, which is one of the clearly defined goals of active learning.

Visuals are a must. I always have PowerPoint slides, websites, and videos at the ready. It’s just a given that this helps enhance lecturing, and there are now tools online to make visual aids more interactive through live polling and quizzes, which should appease the active learning crowd. A visual aid that I want to recommend for all writing courses is having a blank Word document open on the screen to show how to format and compose papers. Believe me, students need to see it and have it explained to them. We can’t assume all students know how to use Microsoft Word on a laptop computer and then assign a 5-page paper to them. Sure, a professor could link students to a video or even make one, but we know students would rather watch Netflix. Having that in-person time to explain formatting, grammar, and other lower-order concerns is beneficial. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I also utilize the whiteboard all the time. Any visual aid is better than none.

Accept that, sometimes, they won’t pay attention. I make something clear on the first day of class: I believe in free will and its consequences. If a student wants to come in and sleep, go ahead. But when they miss out on key information that makes their grades slip, they only have themselves to blame, and neither I nor other students should be expected to save them. Students zoning out or getting distracted will happen, but this is a matter of setting expectations clearly. What also isn’t helping is students sitting there expecting to sponge up everything I say, leading me to my next point…

Emphasize note-taking. I demand that students take notes in my classes, and sometimes ask them to show their notes to me for credit. But once again, it is all about free will. If they want to train their perfect, photographic memory, go ahead.

Examples, allegories, and scenarios are key. Being a visual person, I find myself drawn to stories and figurative language. Students have praised me for my ability to break down topics and make them easier to understand, and I believe it comes from my habit of giving multiple examples of a concept for students to latch on to. When talking about what Prewriting is, I ask who in the class does any sports or physical activity. I then ask them if they just get up and start doing their sport. Many shake their heads. I ask them why not. One says, “You have to warm up.” Why? I ask. “Because you’ll get hurt.” And that’s when I tell the class that’s how they should think about Prewriting. I tend to give these examples and scenarios at the beginning of my lectures to make sure all students are on the same page. I also do my best to pick relatable examples that any student can understand, regardless of background.

With how much higher education swears that students are a name and not a number, it is rather hypocritical to force all educators and students into active learning strategies based on cherry-picked data-driven results. Active learning does work, but it only works when students want to be active. Let us not be too quick to say that lectures or writing traditional essays are passive and that active learning is the light. Lectures can be active and can inspire students to be active.

On the first day of class, I give it to my students straight: I don’t do tests, I don’t do group assignments, and I’m certainly not doing discussion boards. I then give my reasons: you don’t learn from tests, I hated group work in high school, and no one likes to reply to two students’ posts. The only thing we were going to do was discuss, read, and write, because that is how you become a better writer. It always surprises me when I see a wave of relief wash over them, and I notice engagement improving tenfold from that moment on: the phones go away, the eyes are on me, and I can see the lightbulbs go off.

Much like many things in pedagogy, we’re not listening to our students. Because of that, we overthink what we should do. After everyone in a leadership position failed them during the COVID years, students need a leader as much as they need a guide. After all, students (and their parents) are spending a lot of money to come to college. If I had taken my department chair’s class and saw him leave the room, I’d ask for a refund, and I know that’s the last thing college administrators want.