Continuing from a while ago: in May I joined an Eberly Center reading group on the educational approach known as Active Learning (AL). Again, AL essentially just means replacing “passive” student behavior (sitting quietly in traditional lectures) with almost anything more “active.”

I’ve already described the first week, where we discussed the meaning of AL and evidence for its effectiveness. In the later two weeks, we explored how to implement a few specific AL styles.

My notes below go pretty far into the weeds, but some big-picture points: Spend more time on designing good questions & tasks (and perhaps less on your lecture notes). Ask students to put a stake in the ground (whether a carefully-prepared response or just a gut-instinct guess) before any time you lead a discussion, show a demo, or give a lecture. Teamwork (done well) has huge benefits, but make sure the assignments are designed to be done in teams (not stapling together individuals’ separate work), and teach teamwork as an explicit skill.

[OK, so last time I joked we should teach a course called Active Active Learning Learning, where we use AL pedagogy to learn about the stats/ML experimental design concept also called Active Learning. But the reverse would be fun too: Run a course on Design of Experiments, where all the experiments are about evaluating the effects of different AL-pedagogy techniques. That is to say, a good course project for Intro Stats or Design of Experiments could be to evaluate the study designs below and improve or extend them.]

Notes-to-self, from weeks 2 and 3, below the break:
Continue reading “Seminar on Active Learning pedagogy (continued)” →