Active learning: Create your learning tasks

There are a variety of active learning approaches that can be used to provide the learning opportunity for your students – remember the key is to get the students ‘doing’ something.

TIP. Rather than start by presenting content for a new topic, ask your students a question designed to check their current understanding of this topic.

The following links are resources that provide some ideas for creating active learning tasks:

• How can you incorporate active learning into your classroom? [pdf, 95KB] - this resource lists a range of active learning activities and provides a representation of their relative complexity.
• Design your class Links to an external site. - this site presents as a template that can be populated with activities chosen by the teacher to achieve the intended purpose of the learning design. The menu on the right side of the screen describes possible activities listed under each strategy. Select the activity and drag and drop into the appropriate section of the template and the detail of the activity will be revealed.  

A common structure for developing the active learning approach is to follow the model of theory – activity – summary, which is easily remembered using the mnemonic TAS. In this structure each section of your lesson would be built into this three point plan:

1. theory or explanation;
2. an activity that could be as simple as a question to the whole group, or more structured, e.g. where small groups work on making sense of the different aspects of the theory just presented to them; and
3. the summary where you ensure the theory explanation has been developed further by the students so that they are ready for the next stage of the learning.

Every activity needs to include time to discuss the results and summarise the key points. It can be very discouraging for groups to put real effort into discussion or activities which are not finalised in a satisfactory way. They may feel like they are left hanging without any feedback as to their progress and they want to know if their input contributed to the overall outcome. An effective way of developing this summary discussion is to focus on the questions ‘What happened?’, ‘What answers did you come up with?’, ‘What sense did you make of this?’ and ‘Now what are you going to do with this knowledge?’. Put simply What, So What, Now What? The sections titled ‘Debriefing Overview’ and ‘Debriefing Strategies for the Teacher’ on the Support Real Teachers website Links to an external site. are particularly helpful in providing a range of ways you can structure discussions to help summarise learning activities. Their focus is on experiential learning, however the approaches apply equally to all learning activities. 

Some teachers avoid incorporating active learning as they believe that it takes time away from content delivery. Reducing content allows time to concentrate on concepts and it can 'transform' student thinking Links to an external site..

 

Image source: https://pixabay.com/en/sticky-notes-project-management-1455911/