Active Learning

Active learning involves and engages students in the learning process. This means they think about what they are learning. There are many benefits to active learning. Active learning promotes engagement, critical thinking, collaboration, and increases motivation. There are many ways to promote active learning within your own classroom. Include students in the prior knowledge assessments that are given and help them to understand the importance. They will begin to access their own prior knowledge without being prompted. Allow them to work in pairs and groups, but make the students have an understanding of the purpose/expectations for the activity. You can use active learning strategies to discover misconceptions or misunderstandings and to check for understanding. There are many activities that you can do within your own classroom to promote active learning. An easy one that most know of is think, pair, share. The purpose behind this activity is to build wait time, increase participation, and check for understanding. Doing the traditional method of asking a question and calling on students drastically decreases participation with your students. Another activity that you can do and one that wasn't aware of is called graffiti. This looks like randomness on a page, wall, or chart. This is where students add their thoughts on a topic as a group or individually. The purpose is to gather pre-assessment data and to promote critical thinking. Something else that I plan on doing in my future classroom will be to use "Signal Cards". The purpose is to check for understanding. This assessment tool is inexpensive and easy to implement. All you need is red, yellow, and green note cards. If a student has a red card showing then they are not understanding, yellow could mean they get it but are not confident yet, and green could mean they 100% understand and are ready to move on. The last activity that was discussed in the presentation that I want to use in my classroom was the scavenger hunt. The purpose of this activity is to promote movement, verbal fluency, check for understanding, review, preview, or expand on a topic. This activity can serve just about any purpose you need it to and it's fun! You give your students a question or topic and have them work together in groups to determine the answer. You can create things around the room for them to use or make it a digital scavenger hunt depending on your resources.