Active Learning: It's Their Classroom, Not Ours

 Would you want to be a student in your own classroom? It’s a simple and direct question that can often be hard for adult educators to answer, perhaps for a couple of reasons.  One, it’s hard to remember what it was like to be in the bodies and brains of whichever age students we are teaching.  It requires loads of empathy (or a “Family Switch” experience), and empathy can be hard when you see 140 students a day.  Two, it can feel defeating.  Many teachers know what their students need and want to learn at a higher level, but it’s beyond the scope of what many have in their teacher’s toolbelts or simply too much work than they may be able to give at that particular time. So they fall back on the more traditional ways in which they were taught, and what feels simpler and more comfortable.  

What’s often lacking in those classrooms is the concept of active learning.  This is a pedagogical approach that places students at the center of their education and emphasizes the demands of the 21st century, where critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and communication are essential skills.

Why Active Learning Matters

Active learning is more than just a buzzword; it's a fundamental shift in how we approach education. It recognizes that students are not passive recipients of information but active participants in their learning journey. Students take ownership of their learning, which leads to increased retention and understanding.

When students collaborate on projects, solve problems, and express their ideas creatively, they are honing the critical thinking, communication, and problem-solving abilities that are essential for success in today's world. But just as importantly, they are motivated and care about the process of their learning, which they need.  As we know about Gen Z, they need a cause and a reason to learn.  Paraphrasing one of my favorite bloggers AJ Juliani, the generation in the seats in front of us today watch their idols on YouTube making millions of dollars teaching people how to put on makeup, shoot trick shots with ping pong balls, and play public pranks.  Compliance learning does not have the same teeth it once did.  They need more convincing to care about what they’re being asked to learn, and the way they learn it needs to be interactive.  They want to be creators, designers, idea makers.  We just need to provide the spaces to do so. 

Save the Last Word for Me: A Discussion Protocol

Image source: personal use

Image Source: Colin O'Neill

One effective discussion protocol that supports active learning is "Save the Last Word for Me." In this approach, each student brings a response to an open-ended question or an annotation from a text to a discussion of 3-5 students. The steps involved are:

1. Person A shares their post-it.

2. Everybody else shares their thoughts about Person A's Post-It.

3. Person A gets the last word on explaining why they picked that idea to share.

4. Repeat so all group members get a chance at being the "sharer."

By giving each student a chance to share their thoughts and insights, "Save the Last Word for Me" fosters active participation, critical thinking, and respectful dialogue. It also allows students to connect their personal experiences and perspectives to the material being discussed while hearing the thoughts of others to compare against their own.  

Image Source: Catlin Tucker

This week’s topic hits home at a perfect time for me as we’re about to dive into our school’s instructional goals this year with grade level teams.  Our leadership team consisting of admin and teacher leaders chose strategies that all focus on a student centered classroom with questioning and discussion strategies being the focus of our first cycle of learning.  We hope to collaborate to build our teacher’s capacities for facilitating student led conversations.  

One of the first steps is providing protocols and structures (see  Save the Last Word for Me)  for kids who aren’t ready to dive into organic, open ended conversations with each other… which is nearly all of them. 

Image Source: The Danielson Group

Save the Last Word for Me was one of my most effective discussion strategies when I had my own ELA classroom. It taught students how to stop and listen and often created a space for disagreement, which was the perfect opportunity to impart lessons on counterclaim, civil discourse, and how to respectfully disagree with someone.  One variation I leaned into was the incorporation of consensus building at the end of the discussion to share out with the class.  This required some students to bend a bit on their opinions in order to get their groups final thoughts to a place everyone could agree on.  

When we look at the final column of “excellent” in Danielson’s model, we see an abundance of student centered descriptions.  The Danielson Group may not explicitly reference “Active Learning” in its rubrics, but it’s fairly obvious that they, and probably Charlotte herself, value it as a (the?) defining factor in meaningful learning.