Lesson plan What is active learning?

How will I present the task to the students?
Students can be a little nervous about being encouraged to take more responsibility for their learning. It will help to explain briefly to your students why they are doing the task and what they will learn from it. If possible, explain any connection between the task and what your students need for their final examination, so that they understand why it will be useful.

How will I know that every child in my class has learned something?
If you build in assessment tasks, you can check your students’ learning. Effective assessment will give you a good idea of what to focus on in the next lesson, and will also help you to find out which tasks are most helpful for which students. Assessments do not have to be formal (or marked). They are a diagnostic tool to help you and your students to find out what has been learned and understood.
Active learning in practice
When people start thinking about putting active learning into practice, they often make the mistake of thinking more about the activity they want to design than about the learning. The most important thing is to put the student and the learning at the centre of your planning. A task can be quite simple but still get the student to think critically and independently. Sometimes a complicated task does not actually help to develop the students’ thinking or understanding at all. Consider carefully what you want your students to learn or understand and then shape the task to activate this learning.
"...put the student and the learning at the centre of your planning."
There is no typical active learning task. However, all active learning tasks tend to focus on encouraging the students to 'think hard' for themselves, rather than being passive recipients of knowledge.

The following interviews show teachers giving some examples of active learning approaches they have used with their students.

As you listen, think about what it is about each activity that could help develop the students’ learning. What was the activity that each teacher chose and why did they choose it?