International Cambridge trainers Charlie Gilderdale and Fleur McLennan took teachers from Avenor College and other international schools in an intense and revealing learning journey this weekend. Our school was the host of a two-day Cambridge Professional Development workshop on Active Learning and Assessment for Learning. Teachers were involved in a series of presentations, discussions, and exercises designed to help them identify, define and develop active learning in the classrooms.
You can find out what active learning is and why it is more and more important in the modern world from an interview with one of the trainers, Fleur McLennan.
What is Active Learning?
Active Learning is a concept that involves the students being more engaged with their own work because they not only understand what is needed to improve but also why this is an important process. This works very well in terms of continuing their education and going into universities where largely they will be left to themselves to make sense of their own education. We need to start putting that into practice now because too often we spoon-feed them information which they give back to us in the exams, but that’s not what is needed in the modern world.
Active learning is the process that engages creativity, it gets autonomy happening, it makes students more aware that they are active participants in the classrooms, not just an empty vessel to be filled up.
Is it a new educational concept?
In its earlier phases, it started to manifest in 1990. But, as an actual research-based educational theory, it is relatively new, it started around 1998, but now we need big pushes across the world because it is what is demanded of everyone coming into the working system after they leave university.
Across the world, top universities have noticed that they have graduates coming in who can’t sustain the level of interest or academic ability because they have always been spoon-fed. The universities have been crying out for high schools and primary schools to send them students who are more engaged and more autonomous and critical thinkers. It is also reflected in admissions policies for many universities now, which aren’t based on exam grades, they are based on face to face interviews.
Are there specific principles for teaching active learning?
I think that all teachers are masters of their craft and essentially this is not changing the way they teach, it is tweaking the way they teach. It is just looking at the way you would present them in a different way.
For example, instead of looking at the way we construct meaning, we could teach genre, narrative voice, tense, use of punctuation, vocabulary for weeks, and weeks, and weeks, and it would be quite boring. But one piece of poetry with an open question teaches all five of these things simultaneously and the pieces of information are then put together and the students come out of it with a working understanding of how to approach those five things by not only engaging with the material first but also using their knowledge in order to see why the punctuation has been used.
Instead of the teacher standing at the front and telling them why punctuation is there, they are working out why it is there. And then they are able to establish a constructed and shared meaning about why punctuation, for example, is important. And what the rules are behind it and how it can be used and manipulated to create different effects.
What is the feedback you’ve got so far from these series of workshops on active learning?
They are very positive, we’ve got a lot of praise for the amount of energy we put in because it does take a lot of brain power and always everyone is very tired at the end of it. But because it is not asking them to do something extra, is just tweaking what they already do, it is received very well. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be told by someone: “you’re doing everything fine, but just do this as well”. So, this is not an “add-on”, it is an “instead of” and it is nice because it can fit in seamlessly: small changes make transformational change.
