Lesson plan What is active learning?

An active learning checklist
If you are new to active learning, it will help to ask yourself the following questions:

What do the students in my class need to learn?
Try to think about skills as well as subject content.

How will the task that I have chosen help my students to learn?
Different learning outcomes need different types of task. You know your own students’ strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, you can think about what your students particularly need to help them to achieve.

How am I using questioning?
It is easy for teachers to ask lots of factual-recall questions and other closed questions. On the other hand, open-ended questions help students to think for themselves, and to develop their ideas. It is also helpful to ask follow-up questions that will prompt your students to say (and think) more, such as ‘Tell me more about that’, or ‘Why do you think that?’.
Make sure that all students are involved in a discussion. Consider choosing students to answer, rather than inviting them to raise their hands. This way, every student has to think, because every student might be asked to contribute. Also consider pausing before letting your students answer. Leaving three seconds, rather than one, before you allow students to answer gives everyone more time to think about what they want to say.

How far am I creating a positive classroom environment where it’s fine to take intellectual risks?
Students need to be confident in trying out new ideas. They need to know that they will not be laughed at, and that there are high levels of mutual respect.

If I need to focus on content, can I encourage the development of a skill at the same time?
For instance, if a teacher wants their students to learn important factual information that they can use in an essay, he/she could try the following activity:

(i) Ask the students to think of five key facts which they could use as evidence for a particular essay question.

(ii) Ask the students to use at least one of these facts to write a short paragraph as part of an answer to this question.

(iii) Ask how the five facts could be re-used for a different essay question on the same topic. The teacher could either give them these questions, or could get them to think of their own questions.

(iv) Ask the students to write a paragraph as part of an answer to one of these new questions. They should use at least one of their five facts to support their point.

In this way, the students are learning the factual information and also the analytical application of this information. The same is also true the other way around – skills development work usually leads to more high-level thinking if it is linked to meaningful content.