Active Learning is the Best Strategy for Learner Success

When I was a research fellow at Austin Community College, the leader of our program loved to repeat this quote: “If we treated active learning like any other thing we’v researched, by now we would have stopped doing research since it’s so obvious it’s an improvement over exclusive lecture.” It’s from a presentation that Adam Finkelstein gave in 2018. He’s right. My experience as a student and my experience as an instructor tell me he’s right. There is a whole wealth of data to support that he’s right (his presentation cites them but you can also find this evidence in Small Teaching by James Lang or The New Science of Learning by Todd Zakrajsek.)

But building active learning into my material was difficult for me. I’d seen it done in all of my acting classes, but I wasn’t teaching acting. As an adjunct, I was teaching interdisciplinary humanities content (art, literature, history.) As a training specialist for an education technology company I was teaching new sourcing specialists how to use the applicant tracking system and increase efficiency.

I remember talking about this with my research fellows. They were professors with much more experience than me, and they were full time (where I was an adjunct.) “I get it, and I agree, active learning is the way. But I don’t know how to build a humanities class around it.” That’s when this exceptional person from the Faculty Development office held up her laptop to me.

”Here,” she said. “Look at this picture.”

It’s from the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. It lists 19 examples of active learning activities on a spectrum based on complexity and classroom time commitment.

When I connect that list with signposting and objectives alignment, I get a process for determining an effective learning experience. Start with the objective. Then pull up that picture and ask, “Which of these fits that objective the best?”

That’s how I started building active learning into my material. Objective, then finding the right container to practice the objective.

(Image used in accordance with Wikipedia’s image license)