If there are two students in a classroom and one is following along, trying to stay awake while a classmate reads a passage from a textbook and the other one is living the concepts the first one is reading about, which one do you think is more engaged? No, it’s not a trick question. The answer is Student 2 and for good reason. This student is engaged in active learning rather than observing from the outside in passive learning. Active learning generates revamped student engagement, builds student interest, and facilitates the mastery of hands-on skills in ways that are much more efficient and much more beneficial for students in the long run.
The Anatomy of an Active Learning Classroom
When students are actively engaged in their education, enjoyment peaks and this is no coincidence. Active learning has become a hot buzzword among 21st century educators much in the same way as project-based learning or STEM and STEAM have helped springboard educational advances. So, what should an active learning classroom look like? Actually, it’s equally important to consider what should not be in a classroom that’s focused on promoting active learning as it is to consider what should be in there. It starts with the layout and goes from there. In typical classrooms, the seating arrangement fosters lecture-only learning and does not provide for active discussion and engagement. This, of course, can be changed by rearranging the desks into a circle or creating small student clusters for collaboration.
In order for active learning to thrive, all students need to be able to see what’s going on and interact with the subject matter, the instructor, and the other students. Ideally, the classroom should foster both independent and collaborative work. As long as students are working with their hands and fully engaged, they can learn just as much independently as they can in small groups. The layout also allows teachers to move around, creating more interactive lessons for their students in the process. Of course, the technology in the classroom also plays a role in the levels of active learning that take place. The EdTech kids use should be up to date and mobile enough so that they can take it wherever they need it to be. This also helps ease the transition from lectures to student-led group work.
There are a few different ways that active learning classrooms can be set up—some of which we have touched on already. It’s important for teachers to remember that active learning does not necessarily require student collaboration. Team projects can help increase active learning, but there is no reason to be married to having collaboration in your active learning classroom. Instead, teachers should focus on creating work spaces that foster active learning. These spaces should be free of distraction and offer students enough room for testing their projects on the go. There could also be places for both collaboration and private work or rooms that are designed exclusively for group projects. As long as kids aren’t sitting around, however, that’s all that really matters.
Lecturing vs. Active Learning
No one is saying that teachers aren’t capable of teaching students important skills and concepts. They simply cannot learn 21st century skills, like problem solving, coding, and communication without engaging in active learning. Lectures don’t engage the whole student and, while they may be perfectly satisfactory for some kids, there will undoubtedly be others who need the project-based experiences and stimulation of active learning in order to learn. When students are forced to learn through lectures without any other forms of supplemental support, the unfortunate truth is that many of them simply fail to fully grasp what they need to know and wind up ill prepared for the next grade or further learning opportunities.
Lectures and active learning are essentially opposites, each of which have their own sets of positives and negatives. In the 21st century, however, it’s now almost impossible to overlook the positive outcomes that active learning provides for students both in the short run and in the long run as well. When engaged in active learning, students have more structure, are able to receive continuous feedback that they can immediately apply, and they start to construct their own knowledge rather than receiving it as passive recipients. For these reasons, research has shown and continues to show that students engaged in active learning fare much better than kids who routinely sit through lectures and we believe that these results should be noted more than they generally are.
One of the most important differences between lectures and active learning is how students discover answers to the important questions. In lectures, teachers simply tell them the answers and then administer a test a couple weeks later to be sure students have learned what they need to know. In active learning, however, kids are able to find their own answers through meaningful exploration and authentic reasoning. It’s pretty apparent that the active learning method will serve students better especially as the workforce trends toward requiring students to possess the skills they build through active learning. Each student, and teacher for that matter, will have their personal preference when it comes to lectures versus active learning opportunities. We caution each group that lectures won’t help today’s students when they need the hands-on skills to attain and keep employment in a STEM-heavy workforce.
Using EdTech to Create Active Learning
One of the reasons that inactive learning is so stagnant is because students have nothing to stimulate the learning experience. They’re just using textbook pages and meaning-vacant Powerpoint slides to try to learn key concepts. When they’re able to leverage educational technology, however, the active learning starts flowing by default. There are a number of ways teachers can utilize technology to promote hands-on experiences and interactive experimentation. Research shows that when students’ bodies are moving, their brains are working and, more importantly, working harder than they are normally. A lot of the time, EdTech is a catalyst that helps spawn creative ideas and innovative problem solving among students.
EdTech is an easy way for teachers to activate students’ curiosity, thinking, and problem solving to supplement the direct instruction they receive during a lesson. It’s important for teachers to remember that, especially with today’s group of students, EdTech often translates to engagement. It helps students look at problems and concepts from a different point of view and can lead to them employing new ways of thinking to creatively solve problems or create artistic expression. Teachers can even use EdTech as part of their review games, challenging students to not only answer questions, but perhaps work together to construct a model, device, or robot that supports what they’ve learned. In this case, the goal of sparking innovative thinking with technology as the catalyst remains the same.
Some of the best active learning teachers make use of all of the resources they have and one of the most important ones is definitely space. While it’s something not many educators would generally think about, having extra space affords students with extra learning opportunities. Classrooms are only so big, however, and, if there are a lot of students engaged in active learning, there might be some tightly cramped collaboration. So, why not spill out into the hallway? It’s there. No one else is using it. And, the extra space allows students to walk around, examine their projects from multiple angles, forget about space restrictions in their design thinking process, and get excited about programming a robot to navigate the entire length of a hall. Plus, it’s something new, which leads to increased excitement as kids reap the benefits of active learning.
3D Printing as an Active Learning Catalyst
Most of the time, when we think of active learning, we think of some kind of technology being involved. It’s not necessary, but the two just kind of seem to go hand in hand. There is perhaps no other technology that enables active learning more so than 3D printing. When using 3D printing to design, create, and explore, students can’t help but to be engaged in active learning. That’s because 3D printing requires constant monitoring and a great amount of attention to detail. It is also, of course, a tremendously valuable skill to have in the modern world. Not only do 3D printing projects in schools and makerspaces enable children to learn the technology, it helps them build important skills they can use for years to come—all thanks to its dynamic nature and hands-on style.
The accessibility of 3D printing has increased dramatically in the last couple of years, making it an extremely viable tool for active learning in the classroom. Students can use 3D printers to create objects and devices with incredible detail and flexibility by taking care to include key features during the design process. Since they generally have to pay very close attention when inputting designs to 3D print, students are constantly active. More and more schools are now even basing their afterschool STEM programs on 3D printing so that children can benefit from even more exposure to this rapidly growing area. While just one of the players in the active learning revolution, 3D printing has certainly created a shift in how schools roll out these active learning initiatives and it is one that does not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
Some educators may be hesitant to bring 3D printing into the classroom at first because they’re too afraid that neither their students nor they will know how to use the machines properly. You know what we say to that? So what! The whole point of active learning is to learn from mistakes and help students refine what they know as they go. Especially in STEM-focused schools, 3D printing is a natural choice for helping students prepare to excel in future careers that may be heavily reliant on using this technology. Adopting 3D printing in schools—even just for a few hours a week—allows kids to break away from the linear model of education and facilitate an active educational experience. More activity during the school day leads to more engagement and more engagement leads to mastery of hands-on skills. So, maybe 3D printing in K-12 education is more useful than some of us tend to think.
Active vs. Passive Technology
There is perhaps no better catalyst for active learning than educational technology. It doesn’t even have to be high-tech to get kids active, thinking, and engaged while they learn. Sometimes, the most simplistic technology can be the most effective. When we think about it, the EdTech that enables active learning, like introductory robotics tools for example, is effective because it rarely fails, there is easy access to replacements if more students would like to get in on the fun, and there is no training required for students to be able to use them in the classroom. Hands-on technology helps create active learning, while lecture-centered learning, though it still makes use of technologies like overhead slides and pencils, is only employing passive technology and not engaging children as much as it could be.
As you may have guessed, active technology is quickly overtaking passive technology both in terms of frequency and in terms of getting students prepared for the real world. Passive technology generally has only one function, which is somewhat limiting to the students who are trying to use it to enhance their learning. Active technology, on the other hand, enables a range of different learning activities and facilitates meaningful learning experiences based on activity. Also, the technology that kids tend to use on a day-to-day basis is more so active than passive, so it’s important that the tools they use in the classroom mirror this as much as possible. Most of the time, it’s pretty easy to tell which is which. Active technology creates active output for students to express and share information. It naturally supports multiple senses and can be applied to multiple learners and multiple kinds of learners as well.
Another way to quickly tell if a technology is active is to determine if there are audio and/or visual elements to it. If there are either, there’s a good chance it will probably promote active learning. The best active learning technology is also kinesthetic, meaning that kids are able to interface with it using their hands. This transforms how students are able to collaborate, explore, and create more enjoyable learning experiences. Since many technologies are touch-responsive, they, by nature, lead to active learning. And, when students are given the chance to explore learning in new ways in a tech-rich environment, their creativity blooms and they’re able to interactively develop new and needed skills through active engagement and interest-backed exploration.
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