Moving at the Speed of Creativity

23 March
2005
Dr Charles
Bonwell
href="http://www.active-learning-site.com/"
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Internationally recognized leader in
the area of active learning

Has
directed colleges for teaching at learning, been an instructional consultant
nationally and internationally on active learning and critical
thinking
- 1986 honored for outstanding
educational leadership
- co-author of
“Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom” published in 1991 as
well as another text more specific to college
teaching

Initial
surveys
- # of teaching
years
- largest class sections you teach
(winner: over 470 students)

Some
people believe I am out to trash the lecture because my academic focus is on
active learning
- I am a historian, and
this is all you need to know about my teaching
style
- I have been convinced over the
years by the research, lecture can be appropriate for some goals, but given our
goals we may want to engage in some other teaching
methods

Continnum:

-
total interaction - primary interaction with some mini-lectures - - primarly
lecture with some interaction - primarily
lecture

So now I am going to lecture
on active learning for 15-20 minutes
-
please take notes, I am going to ask you to share notes with
others

Our workshop
goals:
1- what is active
learning?
2- why is active learning
important?
3- what are the
barriers?
4- how can these barriers be
overcome?

everyone seems to want a
bag of tricks, what can I do tomorrow?
-
the more important thing is to look at why we can’t do
it

Goal: have everyone take away one
good
idea
AFFIRMATION!

It
is important to receive affirmation for the time and the challenge that we take
and face to creatively engage students in the
classroom

Mission of Colorado Springs
Library: To inform, to empower, to
inspire

Large classes: research
suggests students in large classes have trouble hearing and
seeing

Could there be a better
mission for us as we enter a
classroom

MY THOUGHT: TO
ENGAGE?

Active learning has been
around forever, in 1980s it was the
buzzword
- we wrote the first book that had
“active learning” in its title
- everyone
was telling us we should be doing active learning, but no one was telling us
what it was

A working definition of
active learning (from Bonwell and Eison,
1991)
- “having students doing things and
thinking about what they are doing”
- “it
is an explicit process”

My
experiences in Engineering: I listened to others talk about solving the
problems, then went home and didn’t have a clue when I was asked to follow
through

- we have a perception that
we understand until we actually have to do
it
- in this room “we are the survivors!”
(of the educational
process)

Interesting study at Rutgers
in Chemistry dept:
- at many institutions
there is no connection between the lecture in the
lap
- found if they put the lab in front of
the lecture, retention and performance went way up and more women become
chemists
- reason: they had concrete
experiences on which to attach the theoretical
discussions

Active
learning
- students are involved in more
than listening
- students are engaged in
activities
- less emphasis upon
transmitting information and more emphasis upon developing student
skills
- students are involved in higher
order thinking

my PhD made me an
expert
- my role was to transmit
information

big focus today: we have
the goal of helping students engage in higher order thinking, so how do we
really do this?
- I used to think that I
could do this with students by assigning
things
- when I graded assignments, the
disconnect between my expectations for students and what actually happened
become evident

Active Learning
Continuum (all of us need to be on this, where we are on this is
contextual)

Simple <——–
——> Complex
Pause
Cooperative
Procedure
Leearning

When I talk about “lecture”
I am talking about “teacher talk”
- amount
of teacher talk and active learning will overlap depending on the context of
your course

Quotations allow me to
think more critically about

“All
genuine learning is active, not passive. It is a process of discovery in which
the student is the main agent, not the
teacher”
- M. Adler,
1982

In the past this moved me to
crisis: I perceived my role to be the central one in the
classroom!
- this quote turns traditional
perceptions of the educational process on its
head

David Ausible says the principal
determinant of what a student will learn is what a student already
knows!
- it becomes imperative for us to
understand where our students are

MY
THOUGHT: THIS IS SCHEMA

James Zuell:
target="NewWindow">“The Art of Changing the Brain” is a crucial
reading requirement for all educators
- all
learning is physical
- your name in your
brain is defined by some cells in your
brain
- the more complex the neural
network, the more entrenched that concept
is
- if that idea is very entrenched, we
can’t just tell people “forget that idea now,
ok?”

Only way to help students learn
is to help them make neural connections

I can’t wait to put together a
workshop on active learning and brain
research
- this is where we are really
going to “get it” with active
learning

Research shows students
forget 90% of what they “learned” at Texas Tech 4 years
later
- so we

- this means we have to be very
intentional about what we do

The
student is the main agent, not the
teacher

Zeull book validated
everything I know about teaching that is
good

“Students learn what they care
about and remember what they understand.”
-
Ericksen, 1984

How do we get students
to care about “fill in the
blank”

Question: how do we share the
passion we feel about our content area?
-
this is a very basic question
- AND, how do
students become able to remember what they
understand

At some institutions, some
faculty will say “if they don’t get it, then they don’t belong
here”
- idea is the teacher’s role is to
“put it out,” and the students’ role is to “get it” / “pick it
up”

If kids can give it back to you
on a test, that is not necessarily “deep
learning”
- if you want their learning in
your classroom to fit into the 10% category, you have to really work on this
with them

Need to tell a story first
before sharing you the research
- in NY,
professor said “everything you are talking about is a bunch of
crap”
- he asked the prof for the body of
research that proves what he is advocating is superior to the active learning
theories being advocated

Never seen
research that says active learning harms
students
- some says it is equivalant to
passive learning in terms of measured
outcomes

Study by Thomas in
1972
- if you want students to remember
something, say it 8-10 minutes into the
class
- graph shows retention goes down
till 45 min, then climbs up till 60
minutes

study after study shows the
physiologically barrier we are up against
-
relates to “the 15 minute rule” or stick with a “20 minute
rule”
- there is so much you want to share:
it is tough to shutup
- research suggests
if we break we can go back to the

It
was a 3 hour night class that forced me into active
learning
- once you get to a certain age,
to maintain the same lecture mode can’t be done effectively for 3
hours

if you teach night classes,
your students are already zonked
- if you
are going to talk to them for 3 hours, they are just not going to get
it

Another older study from

If your goal is to transmit
information, nothing is wrong with the
lecture

Learning is primarily an
attitudinal thing
- if student’s don’t
care, students won’t learn

We need
more studies like this
- all studies showed
active learning motivated students more than passive
learning

At Ohio state I did
research, student who favored large classes like it for reasons
like:
- I can leave and the instructor
doesn’t know
- the instructor never will
call on my
- these students like
anonymity

Probably 25% of your
incoming students are at risk for some reason: math, chemistry, reading, or
something else

Study from Notre Dame
At Risk Students in chemistry
- looked at
introduction of active learning, big increase in Bs and Cs in the
class

I blew it, we have been going
for 28 minutes
- now: pair up and share
your notes with a partner

Suggestions
for getting attention:
- tell a
joke
- shout (many find this
offensive)
- turn off the
lights
- raise your
hand

if 25% of your students are
offended, you have stopped
learning

Research by Kathy Ruel now
at Penn State
- looked at several thousand
classrooms in the 1970s
- average number of
seconds between an instructor asked a question and next spoke was 1.2
seconds
-in higher education we wait up to
2.2 seconds!

MY COMMENT: EVEN IN OUR
WORKSHOP ROOM TODAY, ONLY ABOUT 25% OF THE CLASS SAID THEY HAD HEARD OF “WAIT
TIME.” I FIND THIS AMAZING. MAYBE MANY CHOSE NOT TO RAISE THEIR
HANDS.

Question: how many of you want
your students to think?
- if we are just
giving them 1 or 2 seconds to do this
-
Ruel finding: if you wait 3-5 seconds, the quanitity and quality of responses
goes up
- this can transform your
classroom
- this just means: you keep your
mouth shut for 3-5 seconds after asking a
question

Paused every 13-18 minutes
for 6 minutes to let students share notes
-
gave 5 minute free write, and then in a couple weeks a 65 item multiple choice
test
- found differences in scores could be
up to 2 grades depending on cutoff points between control group and experimental
group
- only difference was shutting
up
- if we talk 6 minutes less, students
learn more
- how counter-intuitive is
that?

Brainstorming: use it to get as
many ideas up on the board as you can
-
Fredrick used this to get at prior
knowledge

MY THOUGHTS: GUIDELINES ARE
RODENT RULES, KWL CHARTS

Our topic
now: what are the greatest barriers to using active learning
now

Students have been programmed to
learn passively by the time they get to use in
college

After brainstorming our 2
main obstacles are:
1- Content (too much to
cover)
2- resistance to
change

On subject of
content:
- what assumptioins are inherent
in a statement
- are there alternative
perspectives to these
assumptions

William’s observation: it
is easy to get students engaged in discussion, but without the basis in content
their comments and observations can be
vacant

Often the professor assumes
the students are doing the readings, but they are actually
not

Remember we cannot change those
who do not want to change

100 years
of higher education teaches us that students do learn despite
us
- study 15 years ago showed students did
not leave Harvard thinking any more critically than they
entered

How many of you give
notes?
- Research on note taking: students
get less than 40% of what you are saying in the
classroom
- yet our system is based on the
idea that I say it, students take notes, and I test them on what they write
down
- So, implication is: give students
the notes!

Research has found
incomplete notes are better than no notes
-
if you want students to understand relationships, visual representations are
better
- sequence: have open notes with
visual manifestations of relationships
-
info is growing exponentially: so we need to spend time working with students on
topics they truly do not understand, rather than just trying to give them all
the
information

Techniques:
-
raise hands
-
think-pair-share

Physicists at
Harvard found that when students compared answers, then retention and
participation went up quite a bit
-
students hate to look stupid in front of 400 students (or a classroom of any
size)
– solving
problems
– allow students to develop test
questions (see what the students understand or don’t
understand)
- case
studies
- develop
applications
- peer
assessment
- short
writes
– one minute papers (angelo and
cross: write the muddiest point, what did you
understand)
– formative quiz (ungraded
quiz)

As long as we are the only ones
asking questions for 5-6 years or whatever in the classroom, students will never
learn to ask them
- asking students to
extend their knowledge
further

Research shows most students
look at the grade and pitch a document in the trash: they don’t look at the
comments
- students can learn more

I used to give quizzes every class
session and students hated it till the end of term, when they realized that they
had kept up with the reading
- can use
writing in a variety of ways

students
pay more attention to something they put their name on and turn
in
- find ways to help students summarize
information

Opitimum time to say
something so students will remember is is 8-10 minutes into the
lecture

I recommend you use formative
quizzes every single day in your
classroom
- lets students see the kind of
questions you are going to ask
- lets
students see that all your questions are not straight
memorization

This does take a lot of
work!
- don’t let anyone tell you that
incorporating active learning into your teaching
doesn’t
- we are going to fail and
sometimes our students will fail as we learn new
techniques
- we need to be open about our
failures in the classroom: scientists understand already that our failures are
often most important

When I got my
PhD we thought we must become experts in
content
-
content
- teaching
methods
- group dynamics (how to structure
groups: students hate groups because we as faculty who are dysfunctional in
groups
- learning
styles
-
assessment

Read the literature on
group dynamics
- there is lots of research
that says cooperative learning

href="http://vark-learn.com/english/index.asp"
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A free learning styles
inventory

William comment: no
research supports use of learning
styles

Closing
thought:

“The first objective of any
act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should
serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere, it should
allow us to go further more easily.”
-
Jerome Bruner