Put this month’s article in the “simple and practical tools to make a classroom work” bucket.
I want to present a question that is always on my mind when I’m teaching: How long has it been since my students have been active?
It’s not a complex question and the reason for asking the question is both fairly intuitive for teachers, and also grounded in serious research. As I’ve pointed out in these articles many times, one of the strongest and most stable conclusions education research has come to is that students learn best when learning actively. In other words, students learn best by doing something that requires them to exercise the knowledge and skills you wish for them to learn. Which means that getting away from lecture as a primary teaching method is key, but another key is examining how well structured activities in the classroom are.
A good metaphor for thinking about the question is to envision students as money and learning as investing. If you had twenty dollars would you rather have it earning 10% interest 90% of the time or earning 20% interest 10% of the time? Obvious answer. Or so it seems to me, but I was watching a dance practice for young children the other day. The instructor had about ten students in the class and was having the students practice a dance step. One by one the students would come to the front and do the step left to right across the rest of the students. Active learning? Well, the class was active in the aggregate, but how active was it for each child? The answer is that each child is active at most 10% of the time during that activity. Now, perhaps a child could be benefitted by the opportunity to get quality feedback on the step from the instructor one at a time; however, the question is how much is the quality improved, and does that improvement in quality outweigh the fact that the construction of the activity dictates that each child is only active 10% of the time. Hence the question: would you rather your money earn 10% interest 90% of the time or earn 20% interest 10% of the time? I would argue that an activity would have to be of exceeding importance to merit students only being actively engaged 10% of the time. Hence the question: how long has it been since my students have been active?
So here are some practical suggestions of classroom methods that reduce idle time for students.
Small Groups
Students periodically tell me that they wish I would use bigger groups in class. I can understand why. They worked hard on a speech and they want everyone to be able to hear it. “Are we ever going to give a speech in front of the entire class?”, they ask. They seem surprised when I tell them that it is unlikely that they will give a speech in front of the whole class for the entire time that they are my students. But when I do the math for them, that usually changes. Imagine that you have twelve students in a class, and each speech delivered is going to be just five minutes. It’s a moderately sized class and a very minimal amount of time to speak. If you add to it, though, the time that it takes for applause, movement between speakers, quieting chatter, etc., we’ll assume eight minutes. And then you realize that twelve times eight is 96 minutes. Add to that the administrative tasks of running a class and you would be lucky to do anything else of significance in the class besides having each student spend five minutes actively practicing the skill they are supposed to be learning. And if the class is larger or the speeches longer, then you would have to potentially dedicate multiple class periods just so that students could give one speech. Students start to see the issue pretty differently if I ask the question, “Do you want to spend possibly multiple classes giving only one speech so that you can have the benefit of giving it to everyone?”
The answer to the conundrum is small groups. If you break the class in half, they get to do double the amount of active learning as before. If you break it into fourths, then four times. It’s a simple but powerful principle. If you run activities in small groups, then the opportunity for active learning skyrockets.
Multiple small groups do have some problems. Sometimes they get off track as there are so many of them. They are noisy and can be difficult to manage. And you have to have really clear communication to get students to do what you want when you aren’t there. But in spite of that, they have one really great advantage: they allow students to consistently engage in active learning.
Student Feedback
Getting high quality feedback is an important part of learning new skills and information. Usually the person most equipped to give that feedback is the teacher. Ideally, a teacher would be able to offer that feedback regularly to all students. But let’s imagine that the cost of relying on teacher feedback is that students only get to iterate on a given idea, skill, etc. once or twice where they otherwise could iterate five, six or, seven times? Again it comes down to that question: would you rather students consistently get good enough feedback or intermittently get excellent feedback. Of course, hopefully those aren’t your only two options. But the idea is an excellent argument in favor of peer review.
When students give feedback to each other it means that the class isn’t limited to the pace at which the teacher can review performance. It means that students can give an activity a try, get feedback, and quickly try again. Will some of the feedback be less helpful than what a teacher might say? Definitely. Some might even be less than helpful period. But if students get lots of feedback from other students they are bound to get some good ideas and more importantly, they’ll have more opportunities to maximize their active learning opportunities. That is true because they’ll have the opportunity to iterate on their learning process. It is also true because giving feedback is also an important form of active learning. So, by all means give feedback to your students. But also ask yourself whether or not your feedback is creating a bottleneck in student activity and limiting their chance to be doing in the classroom. Is your feedback creating a scenario in which lots of students are sitting around looking at their phones?
Preparing students to give good feedback takes some effort (some great ideas are published here in Harvard Business Review Publishing: Education), but the benefit in active learning is worth it.
Low Prep Activities
If you are going to write an essay, prepare a presentation, do a research paper, conduct a science project, or compose a speech, what is step one? I always propose this question to my first year students the first time they are going to write an extended speech. If you are going to write a speech, what is step one? The answer that usually comes to mind is to research. First you research, then you write once you have your material, and then you speak and get feedback when it is written. Similar processes could be extrapolated into the other activities mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph. Do you see a problem here?
Let’s think about the process from a different viewpoint. If I research, then write, then speak, how long does it take before I can implement changes? How far into the process would you want to find out that an idea that makes sense in your head doesn’t make sense the way you think it does? How far into the process would you like to find out that someone has an excellent idea that could be added into your own? Would you like that to be when you have already researched and written for hours and implementing those changes potentially means hours more work?
Hence my answer to the question: step one is to speak. Why? Because speaking is a low prep activity. You can do it right now. It is immediate active learning with immediate opportunities for feedback. This is an argument to shorten the active learning process by allowing students to go through the process in rough draft before starting on final drafts. Perhaps you can see why I tell students that the speech writing process is speak and feedback, and then research, and then speak and feedback, and more research, and then speak and feedback, and then write, and then speech and feedback, and then go back to some research, and you get the idea. It seems like it would take longer, but the opposite is true, because they are able to iterate so much more easily.
Active learning isn’t just about helping students be active. It is about giving them lots of opportunities for feedback on that learning so that they can iterate and learn from their experiences. So choosing low prep activities that allow them to go through that cycle is key. These low prep activities can be speaking, free writes, discussion, diagrams, sketches, or anything that can be produced quickly enough to get initial feedback before getting into a more laborious process. Students often complain because they don’t feel ready. But I counter that being ready isn’t the goal. The goal is active learning, a short feedback cycle, and a chance to really try out their ideas before committing to them.
Becoming a Manager
All of this combines to a shift in mindset for the teacher. What is the role of the teacher? Certainly it is to give instruction, offer critique, and even to lecture occasionally. But a role that is just as important is to be a manager of activities. A teacher who allows students to be as consistently engaged in active learning as possible has to start to see him or herself like one of those jugglers who has six or seven plates spinning on top of poles balanced on various appendages. Your job is to keep the plates spinning. It’s a skill that takes time to develop. My education professor in college called it with-it-ness: the ability to manage in one’s brain what is happening across the entire classroom at the same time. It’s the part of the teacher brain that is good at keeping the question of this article in mind: how long has it been since my students were active?
Keeping those plates spinning by ensuring that students across the classroom are consistently engaged comes with some trade-offs. You may not be able to do everything you want for every student, but to accept that trade-off I try to remind myself that in general there is nothing that I am going to do or say to students that is more powerful than them actually trying for themselves. Which means that I try to give them the gift of my personal attention. But even more, I try to give them the gift of a class that consistently challenges them to grow.