Winter Workshop 1: Active Learning

This year’s winter workshop series focuses on ways to teach effectively, and we started off with a fun and productive workshop about the benefits of active learning.  After a brief overview of the series, we began by defining active learning in small groups and compiling each group’s definition into one presentation for all to see.  After this great opening discussion, we compared active learning to traditional passive lectures as participants generated a list of the pros and cons of each.  Following this discussion, we presented a few compelling studies demonstrating how active learning methods improve learning outcomes. Using the information participants had learned so far, they then took time to create active learning activities to use in their own classrooms and then critiqued them in small groups.  We finished up by discussing both the participants’ activities as well as a list of additional activities provided to participants.

The first workshop seemed to go over really well and we had lots of positive feedback.  We were pleased with a big turnout of over fifty participants, and even with a large group the discussions made it possible for many individuals to contribute their ideas.  Given the nature of our workshop on research supported techniques, one of our goals was to discuss literature surrounding the use of active learning.  We found many studies pointing toward its benefits, but did not find any showing that it doesn’t work.  One of our participants brought this up during our discussions, but no one was aware of any contradicting studies.  Also, we knew going into the workshop that fitting active learning into a single, specific definition would be difficult. However, by relying on a few pre-selected definitions from educational professionals, we showed participants how their own definitions shared common themes with the definitions created by professionals. Ultimately, even though some participants preferred to see one definitive definition for active learning and even though common themes in the definitions were important, we believe that active learning is a complex, multi-faceted concept that can be defined in various ways. Using the powerpoint and polling technology was very helpful in this defining process because we were able to quickly compare participants’ definitions side by side for all to see.  The participants seemed to enjoy the use of technology in our workshop and we hope they are looking forward to the future workshop on teaching technologies.  Altogether, we had a great time preparing and giving this workshop on active learning.