Week 2

This week we will explore the following questions:

• Where do I currently apply active learning in my practice?
• What does effective active learning look like?

  This week's completion criteria: 

• Work with your group: share an activity that you currently do in class that applies active learning and review your colleagues' ideas.
• Describe how you will adapt an active learning technique to use with your learners.

We recommend that you access the course every day to check your messages and take part in any discussions. To help you manage your time, here is a suggested guideline of when to carry out the activities of the week.

Guess the Lesson Objective 

As teachers, we often tell students our lesson objectives (or aims, or the questions we want them consider) at the start of the lesson. This can be very helpful, because it encourages students to focus on the most important aspects of the lesson. However, if this happens every lesson, students can sometimes take it for granted and start ignoring the objectives. Here is one strategy for dealing with this problem. It works best if it is only used occasionally, as students enjoy the novelty of it. 

• Tell your students that you are not going to tell them the lesson objectives or key questions at the start. Instead you are going to ask them at the end what they think the objectives or key questions were. Explain to your students that this is partly to get them concentrating, and partly so that you can check with then how relevant your teaching is to the key question.
  
• Ask the students at the end of the lesson what your objective or key questions were. 
  

This will ensure the students listen very carefully and think about the ‘big picture’. It will also help you to be really focused on what you cover in the lesson. 

Provocation

A ‘provocation’ is an activity that provokes or encourages student thinking. Some examples include:

• Ask the students to think of the questions they want to ask about a particular topic.
  
• Use a relevant image to provoke thought. Get the students to describe what they see, to respond to what they see, and then to discuss what they now want to know. This is similar to the ‘See – Think – Wonder’ approach.
  
• Demonstrate an experiment (or show a video of it). Instead of explaining why it works, ask the student open-ended questions about it.
  

Visible Thinking 

Visible thinking is an approach designed to make the learning process clearer. In other words, students get to know the processes which go into deeper thinking. This helps the students to develop their thinking strategies. Some examples include:

• Think - Puzzle - Explore. This is a ‘thinking routine’, which links students’ existing knowledge to their future independent enquiry. Students answer the questions:
  
• What do you think you know about the topic?
• What questions (puzzles) do you have?
• How can you explore this topic?
   

• See – Think – Wonder. This is another thinking routine. It is designed to work with images, but could also work with lots of other things, such as watching a video clip, or carrying out an experiment. Students answer the questions:
  
• What do you see?
• What do you think about that?
• What does it make you wonder? 
   

The Visible Thinking Project has an excellent website at: http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/VisibleThinking_html_files/VisibleThinking1.html 

Questioning

• Give students time to think of an answer before asking for responses. This might just mean insisting on a waiting time of 3 seconds. Research shows this makes a significant difference, with lots more students willing to answer the questions. It might be that you give students 5 minutes to think about an answer before you ask them for their response..
  
• Consider choosing students to answer, rather than asking for a show of hands. That way all students know they might be asked to contribute. Some teachers write student names on ice-lolly/popsicle sticks and choose a stick from the pile each time they want an answer to a question. Remember that the students don’t see the sticks. This means that you could actually select students you think are well-suited for each question.
  
• Use open-ended questions where possible. This allows students to think more deeply.
  
• Push the students to develop their points by asking follow-up questions. Good questions include, “Go on...", “why do you think that?”, “could you say more?”.
  
• Get students to write their own open-ended questions for the class to discuss, or exam-style questions for the class to answer. You could then choose the best ones to be answered in the next part of the lesson or for homework. 
  

Class debate 

This is a great way of structuring a discussion. It encourages students to work together to develop their ideas, and helps them to apply their existing knowledge on a topic. 

• Students work in groups to prepare statements either for or against a key statement (eg, ‘Shakespeare’s Richard III is a completely evil character’). If you have a large class, you could choose several different statements on the same topic, and have one group working ‘for’ and one working ‘against’ each of these statements.
  
• Students feed their statements back to the class.
  
• Groups then have time to think about questions they want to ask other groups. These questions can be used as the basis for a debate across the opposing groups.
  
• If you have multiple statements being discussed, you could get the other groups to vote on which arguments they found most impressive. 
  

Quiz creation

Get your students to design quizzes to share amongst the class. This could be done on paper, or you could use a free online tool such as Quizlet or Hot Potatoes. If your school uses as a learning space such as Edmodo or Moodle, these also have quiz-creation tools. 

Experimentation 

Use science experiments to reinforce the learning points. Help students to ask their own questions, and design their own experiments to answer these.

• If materials are not available, you can still ask students to plan an experiment. You could also consider the use of online simulators if you aren’t able to perform a particular experiment with the students.
  
• Use spreadsheets of raw data which students can interrogate with formulae and other analysis techniques.
  

More generally, students benefit in all subjects from creating theories and testing them out. Encourage students to ask questions of the material they are studying, and to ask, ‘what if...?’ 

Exit activity 

Ask students to do something on exit from the classroom which keeps them thinking right to the end, such as:

• Students write one thing they have learned and one question they want to discuss on a ‘post-it’ note, and stick them to the wall as they leave. Teachers can look at the answers to assess what the students have learned. They can use this in their planning for their next lesson, changing their plans if needed. This activity also encourages students to think about what they have learnt right up until the end of the session.
  
• Teachers ask an ‘exit question’ or give an ‘exit fact’. The question or fact should be as thought-provoking as possible. For example, it could be a fact which would challenge some of the key ideas discussed during the lesson. This might link to the theme of the next lesson. The idea is to ask or say something which will provoke discussion as the students leave the room. It should keep them talking as they go down the corridor to their next lesson. 
  

The ‘Flipped Classroom’ 

Traditionally, classes have often focussed on helping students to acquire knowledge, with homework time being used for the development and application of this knowledge. In a flipped classroom, the opposite happens. Students get to know a topic before the lesson, and then the lesson is used for activities which develop their thinking and understanding. 

 Examples of activities in preparation for the lesson include:

• Note-taking from a textbook
  
• Reading an article or a chapter from an academic book on the topic
  
• Listening to a podcast or watching a video. These could either made by the teacher or found by the teacher on the web
  
• Doing some research - for example, making a hand-out on a key topic to share with the rest of the class.
   

Examples of lesson activities include:

• Discussion or seminar based on the homework
  
• A problem-solving task
  
• An essay-planning activity
  
• Almost all of the activities suggested in this hand-out.