Active learning about active-learning design with a ‘tool-to-think-with’
Active learning about active-learning design with a ‘tool-to-think-with’
Dr Éric Bel and Johanna Tomczak
What is the idea?
What would you do if, in the middle of a busy day, you arrived in a classroom, where a group of eager learners were waiting for you, and suddenly you discovered that there was a power cut? How would you react in relation to the digital technology-dependent learning session that you had thoroughly planned to facilitate on this occasion? Cancel this lesson, revert to talking to – or, worse, at – your audience, ready for a passive learning experience, or do your best, and decide that, next time, you will plan learning differently?
What follows is our contribution to prompting you, or those you support in enhancing their teaching, to review the way active-learning opportunities are planned, with the help of a simple, practical “tool to think with over a lifetime” (Papert, 1980, p. 76). At this stage, we should note that ‘active learning’, in our view, refers to any type of learning that will involve learners, therefore prompt them to engage in some form of activity; build upon learners’ intrinsic motivations, rather than extrinsic reasons, for learning; promote construction of knowledge and development of skills by, rather than transmission of information to, learners; allow, and encourage, them to explore and make mistakes; provide learners with comments on their progress.
We start from the premise that, in a time of crisis, when much of what we need in order to teach has broken down, there is nothing more useful than a good old, tested theoretical framework. This enables us to stop, reflect and, perhaps, go one or two steps back in our active-learning design practice, to anticipate what should remain, for example, if technology fails. We hope that you will be able to apply our printable easy-to-use ‘tool-to-think-with’ to designing active learning, to avoid some potential technological nightmare; or simply to remember why you used to enjoy learning and teaching so much before electronic devices became ubiquitous in education!
Our proposed tool-to-think-with emphasises the idea that, whether you plan to facilitate a single lesson, a series of connected learning sessions or a whole course, the best approach to adopt may well be to refrain from thinking about using the latest technological gimmicks. Indeed, instead, adopting a systematic approach to thinking about what is going to happen in the learning opportunities that you are designing should enable you to be as ready as possible for whatever crisis that is still to come, be it this power cut which was mentioned earlier, or any other types of critical incidents in your teaching practice.
This is how we would like to share with you our idea of a tool-to-think-with, for active-learning design, which is largely based on a well-rehearsed, but powerful, concept: What Biggs (1996) calls ‘constructive alignment’ (see also Young’s and Perović’s (2014) suggested activities that could b