It’s easy to be intimidated by Active Learning for two key reasons.
Firstly, you have to give up (some) control of the room and allow participants to move beyond passive engagement; they’ll need to talk, question, interrogate, interpret, and experiment to be actively engaged.
They’ll probably get it wrong. They might not be happy in uncertainty. They might ask unexpected questions… this means you have to hold that space open as a facilitator, you’ll probably have to ad-lib and ultimately live with that uncertainty yourself. This also takes time.
But think about what they’ll get from it; they’ll own their own learning – they worked it out themselves rather than being told. They’ll have had to wrestle with it, think about it. It’ll be better nuanced, better connected to other knowledge, and better remembered.
The second reason to find active learning intimidating is we can assume it needs to be a grand and elaborate design.
Nope.
My favourite and most-used active learning method is super simple.
Think – Pair – Share.
You’ve almost certainly experienced it.
1st instruction, Think: “Think about this individually, note down your thoughts and questions”. Give them 2-10 minutes depending on the scale of the content to be discussed and its complexity.
(Bonus method: Use Edward de Bono’s PMI – Plus, Minus, Interesting framework – what’s good about this, bad about this, and what’s unknown, uncertain, or context-dependent about this?)
2nd instruction, Pair: “Pair up, share your individual thoughts and questions. Where do you agree and disagree in your observations?” Give them 5-10 minutes. You could roam around the the room and check in on the pairs.
3rd instruction, Share: Either “one of each pair share one or more collective observations with the class” Or (for bigger classes) “gather in groups of 4-6 and discuss key points emerging from your pairs”. This should be 10-20 minutes.
Just using this you can get some simple and pretty manageable discussions going.
It’s not too intimidating for students anxious about contributing or presenting because the scale of speaking in front of class scales slowly and because, once paired, they can defer to a partner to share their ideas for them. It also prevents confident experts from instantly dominating a class discussion.
