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Strategies of Award Winning Online Teachers

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Strategies of Award Winning Online Teachers

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This article seems appropriate since award winning teachers actively engage students through learning. Online learning has created many challenges for teachers, therefore this article can help classroom teachers more effectively engage students using alternative methods.

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Teaching Strategies of Award-Winning Online Instructors

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A recent study gleaned five insights on virtual instruction by examining the techniques shared in common by top-rated online instructors.

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Active Leaning Strategies for Large Groups

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Active Leaning Strategies for Large Groups

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This is a collection of active learning strategies designed for large groups of students.

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This graphic was designed as an inspirational visual in order to aid in planning for active leaning.

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This image showing how learning increases based on how effective and active is the mode of learning. This image comes from teaching content of science and data analysis but applies to a wider range of subjects.

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This visual depicts many active learning activities and puts them into a spectrum. This enables educators to varying their activities while still providing learning through student-based learning.

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How to Create an Active Learning Environmet

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How to Create an Active Learning Environmet

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This article explains that the how to change the approach to learning within your classroom. The article goes through six steps with the educator in order to effectively assist them with developing a classroom based on active learning.

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Step 1: Analyzing needs for implementing an active learning strategy

Before deciding on an active learning strategy, analyze the need. Ask yourself:

Evidence & Data

What evidence is there that a particular active learning strategy will enhance my teaching and learning or improve learning?

How will this active learning strategy help your students meet the learning objectives?

What observational or concrete data do you have about your classroom that can inform you about why you need to change it and how?

What does the research literature suggest about my particular subject matter and best approaches to teaching it?

Pedagogical Challenges

What is the challenge with your current classroom?

What concepts or topics do students struggle with the most based on observation, in-class student responses, quiz/test scores and/or other assignments?

Do students need more personalized attention applying certain skills and knowledge in-class where your expertise could guide or coach their development?

Strategies

Based on the feedback and data you have collected about your class and students, where do active learning strategies makes sense in your course?

Are there examples of the active learning strategies that you have seen that would be valuable to your students?

Step 2: Identify topic and questions

The first step is to identify the topics you wish to apply active learning strategies. Additionally, identify the overarching questions about this topic.

Example: Topic: Water Pollution in the Hudson River, New York City

Questions: Is the Hudson River really polluted? What are acceptable levels? Who decides these levels? Is there a single right answer to this problem?

Step 3: Identify learning objectives & outcomes

Next, define the learning objectives and outcomes for each topic:

Give an example of a well-written learning objective with outcome: Students will collaborate in small groups (2-3) to conduct a research study on water pollution

Learning outcome: Students will demonstrate their understanding by gathering data, analyzing data, providing written results that meet professional research standards, and presenting orally and pictorially to the class the results [Outcome].

Step 4: Plan and design the activity

Now that you have clearly identified learning objectives and outcomes, you can begin to plan and design the activity through considering the following questions:

Will the activity occur in the classroom, outside the classroom, or both? Prepare a timeline plan to help you manage the activity and keep students on task.

Provide clear and specific instructions to students before the session.

Describe how students will engage with each other and complete the activity. Outline the steps.

Establish and communicate ground rules and guidelines for group etiquette.

Assign roles and responsibilities for any group work, collaboration, discussions or debate.

Provide an agenda that includes a timeline of the topics and activities to be covered during the session.

Provide verbal feedback that is consistent and fair.

Consider how the in-class activity will continue after class in order to extend the learning process and experience.

Communicate to students after the session. Prepare a rubric for assessing student effort. Determine what kind of technology or media you will need for the classroom, for students to access outside the classroom, etc...

Step 5: Identify sequence of learning events

Next, plan the sequence of learning events that will best meet the learning objectives and outcomes. Active learning does not have to replace traditional lecturing; instead, it may be interspersed with the ways you usually conduct the class. For example, you could lecture for 10-15 minutes, carry out an active learning activity, and, then, return to lecturing. Or, one week you could lecture, but assign an active learning activity for homework; then, the next week, you could flip your class and carry out active learning exercises with students already familiar with the lecture material during class time. There are many ways to sequence the learning events. Your job is to carefully think through the planning and delivery of these events to support your learners.

Step 6: Evaluate and assess

You should analyze the effectiveness of the active learning activity and assess whether or not it aided student understanding and met the associated learning objectives. Please see the next section for specific information on how to complete this evaluation and assessments.

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Steps to Creating an Active Learning Environment

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Step 1: Analyzing needs for implementing an active learning strategy Before deciding on an active learning strategy, analyze the need. Ask yourself: Evidence & Data What evidence is there that a particular active learning strategy will enhance my teaching and learning or improve learning?

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Active Learning in the Science Classroom 

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Active Learning in the Science Classroom 

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Active learning in the science classroom has great advantages to engaging students. Students with disabilities are not always included within science activities and this article provides resources and examples that discuss how to include them for impactful active learning too.

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Learners with significant multiple disabilities are not always included in science activities, as teachers are not always sure how to make these lessons meaningful or accessible. Some teachers may believe that it is difficult for students with severe special needs to be active participants in a science curriculum, but using an Active Learning approach can change all of that!

What is Active Learning?

To learn more about Active Learning, visit Active Learning Space, which is a collaboration between Perkins School for the Blind, Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and Penrickton Center for Blind Children.

How can goals be aligned with the curriculum?

Science activities are generally aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Teachers usually begin by looking at what the general education students are working on at a particular grade level and then, using differentiated learning, adapt the activities and modify the goals for individual students. For example, typical Kindergarten classes study plants. The NGSS for this may include:

K-LS1-1.Use observations to describe patterns of what plants and animals (including humans) need to survive.

K-ESS3-1.Use a model to represent the relationship between the needs of different plants and animals (including humans) and the places they live.

K-ESS2-2.Construct an argument supported by evidence for how plants and animals (including humans) can change the environment to meet their needs.

For students who are functioning at a developmental level well below Kindergarten, it may be helpful to use a tool such as Texas' Early Learning Pathways or another tool that presents access skills for students functioning at the 0-3 year level. These tools typically provide lists of essential knowledge and skills at the earliest stages of development.

Texas' Early Learning Pathways includes a page about science: Supporting the Pathway of Exploration, Discovery, and Memory to Science.

For a student with significant learning needs, the goals may be related to basic cognitive skills, such as:

How can an Active Learning approach be implemented?

To learn more about how to implement an Active Learning approach, see Implementation Strategies and Science on the Active Learning Space website.

In the videos below you will see an Active Learning approach to teaching a science lesson about plants and their growth cycle. What both of the students are doing is the basis for all scientific learning - observation, exploration, experimentation, and the development of hypotheses about how the world works.

The Science Lesson

Here is a simple science lesson taught in an environment using a HOPSA dress.

Here is a similar lesson taught using a Support Bench.

Science Lesson Using a Support Bench

Description: A science lesson facilitated by using an Active Learning support bench.

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Teaching Science Using an Active Learning Approach

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Learners with significant multiple disabilities are not always included in science activities, as teachers are not always sure how to make these lessons meaningful or accessible. Some teachers may believe that it is difficult for students with severe special needs to be active participants in a science curriculum, but using an Active Learning approach can change all of that!

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The Correct way to use Role-Play in the Classroom

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The Correct way to use Role-Play in the Classroom

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This article describes guidelines for using the active learning strategy of role-playing. It is important that students understand the goal of the activity is to put on the thoughts and actions of a character and clearly express the learning goal.

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5 Active Learning Strategies utilizing Zoom

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5 Active Learning Strategies utilizing Zoom

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This is an article on how to apply some well known active learning strategies utilizing Zoom. For example, they method of Think-Pair-Share uses the Zoom share screen and breakout rooms to accomplish virtual active learning.

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Moving your class sessions to a virtual space, such as Zoom video conferencing, brings new opportunities for active learning and student engagement. This resource provides simple strategies that combine active learning principles with online tools so students can encounter and engage with information and ideas, and reflect on their learning. These strategies apply to both small and large class sizes, subject to the participant limit of your video conferencing program and license.

Zoom: Annotation and Whiteboard Tools
For more details on how to use these tools, please see: Using annotation tools on a shared screen or whiteboard and Sharing a whiteboard.

What is Active Learning?

Bonwell and Eison describe active learning strategies as "instructional activities involving students in , L. Dee Fink builds upon Bonwell and Eison's definition by describing a holistic view of active learning that includes all of the following components: Information and Ideas, Experience, and Reflective Dialogue doing things and thinking about what they are doing¹." In Creating Significant Learning Experiences . ² This framework can be a helpful tool to consider how your students...

encounter (new) information and ideas
e.g., by watching videos or reading PDFs in advance, or from a short presentation you give using Zoom's Share Screen feature

engage with information and ideas
e.g., through discussions with their peers using Zoom's Breakout Rooms feature and documenting their conversations in collaborative Google

reflect on their learning
e.g., by spending the last five minutes of the online class session engaging in reflective writing and sharing their thoughts through an open-ended poll on Poll Everywhere .

...to meet the student learning objective(s) for your course.

The CTL is here to help!

If you have questions or would like support in developing and implementing active learning in your online course, please reach out to the CTL at ColumbiaCTL@columbia.edu . You can also get one-on-one support via phone or Zoom during our virtual office hours .

Columbia Supported Online Tools for Active Learning

In this resource, we will reference the following online tools supported by Columbia University:

-video conferencing, including the following features*:

Share Screen -share your screen, your student's screen, or a virtual whiteboard

Breakout Rooms -divide the main virtual room into smaller virtual rooms

-launch multiple choice polls

Nonverbal Feedback -allow students to express opinions by clicking on icons

Poll Everywhere -audience response system for polling

*Note: If you do not see any of the above Zoom features in your Zoom meeting space, you may need to enable them first.

If you have questions about teaching with any of the above tools, please reach out to the CTL at ColumbiaCTL@columbia.edu . You can also get one-on-one support via phone or Zoom during our virtual office hours .

Active Learning Strategies

The active learning strategies you select should serve the course learning objectives for your students. Remember, the goal of active learning is not simply for your students to do things, but to also think about what they are doing. As you learn more about the following strategies, consider how effective each would be in promoting the learning you desire from your students.

Here are some questions to think about when selecting an active learning strategy:

What skill should my students be able to perform by the end of our online class session?

Which active learning strategy will allow my students to practice this skill?

When will my students encounter and engage with information and ideas? When will they reflect on what they've learned? (Any of these active learning components can be done before, during, or after the online class session.)

Strategy 1: Polling

Overview Tools used Amount of pre-class preparation required How to Implement
Determine your purpose for conducting a simple multiple-choice poll in your online class session by considering the following:

Here are some possible ways you can use polls for active learning in your online class session:

Create the Zoom poll (see Zoom Help Center to learn how) and determine how much time your students will need to respond to it. Make sure the question title and prompt is clearly worded and not open to misinterpretation.

Prior to launching the poll, provide verbal and written instructions on how to complete the poll. Once launched, you will be able to see in real time the number of students and the percentage of the class that have responded to the poll, the time elapsed, and the results of the poll.

End the poll when the allocated time is up. You can then choose whether to show the class the results of the poll. Either way, be sure to directly address or have your students respond to the results of the poll, and relate it back to the purpose of the poll.
Alternative Tools for Polling

CourseWorks (Canvas) Quiz has an ungraded survey feature that can be used for polls both synchronously and asynchronously.

PollEverywhere can be used for more advanced polling activities such as using open-ended text questions or images. Unlike Zoom, the results from PollEverywhere can be directly transported to CourseWorks (Canvas).

Strategy 2: Think-Pair-Share

Overview

This active learning strategy involves posing a short problem, scenario, or question to your students and giving them the time and opportunity to complete the following steps:

1. Think through the problem, scenario, or question individually.

2. Pair with a partner to discuss.

3. Share their findings or takeaways with the rest of the class.

This strategy not only gives your students time to process and apply their knowledge and skills on their own first, it also gives them the opportunity to consult and collaborate with a peer. This process usually elicits more thoughtful responses while also lowering the stakes of sharing with the rest of the class.
Tools used Amount of pre-class preparation required How to Implement

Think: First, pose a short problem, scenario, or question for your students to work through on their own for about 30 seconds to a minute. Read the question out loud while also displaying it on a slide that you share with your students using Zoom's Share Screen feature. As your students are thinking through the problem, click on Zoom's Breakout Rooms tool so you can enter the number of breakout rooms needed in order for each to contain a pair of students. Zoom conveniently displays the number of participants per room based on the number of participants present and the number of rooms you select. If you have an odd number of students, subtract one from the total number of students and divide that by two to get the number of rooms you should create; Zoom will automatically assign one of the breakout rooms with three students instead of a pair.

Pair: When your students are ready to pair up, let Zoom automatically assign them to the breakout rooms. Give your students about 5 minutes to introduce themselves to their partners and share their thoughts on the assigned problem. To help your students keep track of the given problem and directions, you can the problem and instructions through a message to all the breakout rooms.

Share: When your students are ready to share, close the breakout rooms so all your students return to the main room. Ask for volunteers to share their answers or discussion takeaways by having them use the hand-raise feature in Zoom. Unmute one volunteer at a time so they can acknowledge their partner and share their response with the entire class. Mute the volunteer who has spoken before unmuting the next one. Repeat this process until you are satisfied with the number of contributions and/or perspectives shared.

Alternative active learning strategies with similar setups

Strategy 3: Minute Paper

Overview Tools used Amount of pre-class preparation required How to Implement
Before your online class session, write an open-ended prompt that students can respond to in less than five minutes. You can vary the prompt to target specific knowledge and skill sets or solicit big picture free responses.

Example prompts include:

What questions about today's topic are you most interested in exploring?

What was the most important point of today's lesson?

Share an experience from your everyday life that illustrates this principle.

What steps will you take to maximize your learning for the upcoming test?

Reflecting on the essay you just submitted, what would you have done differently that would improve your essay?

When your prompt is ready, use it to create an open-ended poll in Poll Everywhere (external to Zoom). Using Poll Everywhere to collect minute paper responses allows you to either display the responses as they come in or download a CSV spreadsheet containing all the responses to skim for trends and themes later.

During your online class session, when you are ready for students to complete their minute papers, activate your open-ended poll and use Zoom's Share Screen tool to share the Poll Everywhere window with your students. While the instructions for responding to the poll will be shown via shared screen, you should also read the instructions out loud to ensure all students receive that information.

Give your students about five minutes to go to the displayed Poll Everywhere site and type in their responses to the minute paper prompt. Depending on your goal, you have the option of addressing select responses as they come in or compiling the results after class so you can address them at the start of the next one.
Alternative active learning strategies with similar setups

Strategy 4: Small Group Discussions

Overview
Small group discussions are one way for your students to delve more deeply into a given problem or issue. You can pose an open-ended question or problem, or provide your students with a scenario or case study to work through. The duration is dependent on the task. Groups can then present their results or findings to the rest of the class.
Tools used Amount of pre-class preparation required How to Implement
Reflect on the learning objective that would most benefit from small group discussion. From this learning objective, develop the discussion prompt that you will assign to your students. For example:

Learning Objective: Analyze Figure 3 of the assigned research article.

Discussion Prompt: How well does the data shown in the figure support the author's claims?

When assigning the small group discussion, be sure to include clear instructions on what your students are supposed to do. Examples include:

How many students will be in each group

How much time they have for the discussion

What they need to report back to the class and how much time they have to do so

Upholding discussion guidelines that they previously agreed to

Because your students are having these discussions completely online, it is best not to have too many students in each group; 3-4 students per group for a 10-minute small group discussion allows each student to contribute substantially to the discussion.

To help facilitate the small group discussion and ensure that all students engage, either assign or have your students volunteer for the following roles:

Facilitator + Timekeeper-keep the discussion focused on the assigned prompt

Notetaker-record the main points of the discussion on a collaborative document like Google or

Challenger-push the group to view the problem or issue from different perspectives

Reporter-report the main takeaways of the discussion back to the rest of the class

You could have students rotate roles across the semester so that they get to experience and learn the different skill sets associated with each role.

Let your students know that you, and if applicable, your co-instructor(s) and/or TA(s), may be dropping into each breakout room periodically to check their progress and answer any questions, but that they do not have to stop their discussion if they do not need anything from you.

After providing your students with both verbal and written instructions, give them a minute to ask you any clarifying questions before you send them to their breakout rooms.
Alternative active learning strategies with similar setups

Strategy 5: Short Student Presentations

Overview

Short presentations provide an opportunity for students to engage in peer instruction. This type of activity invites students to synthesize and communicate their knowledge. Students can be asked to research an issue of interest to them that is related to the course topic or work on a problem outside of class, and to present their findings during an upcoming online class session. This allows students to link course content with their own interests and lived experiences, and learn from their peers.
Tools used Amount of pre-class preparation required How to Implement
Identify a course learning objective that would greatly benefit from having students explore the topic further on their own. For example, you could have students use their analytical skills that they developed during the course to analyze a different area, setting, artifact, or scenario of their choice. Alternatively, you could have your students design proposals to address a problem raised in class.

Assign student presentations with sufficient time for your students to prepare their presentation, e.g., at least one to two weeks in advance. Be sure to provide specific instructions regarding the format and duration of the presentation, e.g., "The presentation is 5 minutes long with 10 minutes for audience questions," as well as any criteria for evaluation, which could be represented as a rubric.

This strategy works best if you provide students with preliminary feedback on their presentations prior to your online class session. Consider having a short online meeting with each student presenter or checking in via email to provide feedback on their presentation and to answer their questions at least a few days before your online class session.

When it is time for your students to present during your online class session, first remind the class of the purpose and format of the student presentations. Encourage your students to be active listeners during the presentation, e.g., reflect on how the presentation might apply to your interests, explore how the presentation enriches your perspectives on the topic, type your questions into the Zoom chat, or write down your main takeaways from the presentation.

When the student presenter is ready, unmute their microphone and allow them to share their screen with the class.

While the student is presenting, you may monitor questions that are being submitted by other students to the Zoom chat. Once the presentation is finished, select a few questions for the presenter to address.

When the student presenter is done answering questions, consider having all your students reflect on what they learned. For example, you could ask your students to summarize their main takeaways from the presentation or describe how the presentation connects with different aspects of the course. Have your students share their reflections on a discussion board on CourseWorks (Canvas) or an open-ended poll on Poll Everywhere. You can skim through these reflections to see what your students gained from the student presentations.
Alternative active learning strategies with similar setups

Digital scavenger hunt: Students find or create media (images, video clips, audio clips) that they think best represent assigned course concepts to share with the class.

Student group presentations: Students work in small groups outside of class on an assigned project and present their findings during the online class session. Other students in class focus on asking questions and linking the presentation to course content.

Final Tips

Working in a virtual classroom requires patience. Begin with simple low stakes activities for you and your students to get comfortable with the new format and provide time and opportunity for your students to ask you questions. Eventually, instructors, TAs, and students will gain proficiency with these online tools.

Do a test-run of each activity you plan to use before your online class session, preferably with a CTL Learning Designer or a teaching colleague. Given the number of user-specific settings in Zoom, you will want to ensure that all the features you will be using have been enabled prior to your online class session. Some features cannot be enabled once your online class session has launched.

If you have questions or would like support in developing and implementing active learning in your online course, please reach out to the CTL at ColumbiaCTL@columbia.edu . You can also get one-on-one support via phone or Zoom during our virtual office hours .

References

1. Bonwell, C.C. & Eison, J.A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report 1. Washington, D.C.: George Washington University.

2. Fink, D.L. (2003). Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

3. Mazur, E. (2013). Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. Pearson Higher Ed.

4. Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K. P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed). Jossey-Bass Publishers.

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Active Learning for your Online Classroom: Five Strategies using Zoom

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Moving your class sessions to a virtual space, such as Zoom video conferencing, brings new opportunities for active learning and student engagement. This resource provides simple strategies that combine active learning principles with online tools so students can encounter and engage with information and ideas, and reflect on their learning.

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This video is 11 minutes long and is a great explanation of teaching active reading strategies. The video goes through a description of each strategy, while showing how to perform it. It also explains the benefits of the strategy, as well as comparing it to the other reading strategies, clearly explaining the pros & cons of each.

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10 Active Reading Strategies // Study Less Study Smart

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This is a 40 minute video of a workshop on active learning and teaching. It is a comprehensive introduction into active teaching, explaining how and why the approach works for student learning.

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Active Teaching and Learning  Strategies

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This article demonstrates the evidence for the effectiveness of active learning strategies in science. It is important to use effective strategies in learning and backing up particular pedagogy with evidence based strategies.

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the publication of " A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Reform" by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983 ( 75) was only the first of many recent calls for the reform of K-12 science education in the United States. The following year, the Association of American Medical Colleges ( 4) called for significant changes in the teaching of basic sciences to medical students. In 1990, the National Research Council ( 76) identified problems with biology education in our nation's high schools, and, more recently in 2003 ( 77), it voiced concerns about the way in which undergraduate education in biology is carried out. All of these critiques have urged us to adopt approaches to teaching that more actively involve the student in the learning process, that focus on problem solving as well as memorization, and that lead to more long-lasting, meaningful learning (see Refs. 61 and 70 for discussions of educational reforms in the life sciences).

One of the most pointed critiques of the state of science education was articulated by Volpe in 1984 ( 107), and his words are as relevant today as they were more than 20 years ago.

Public understanding of science is appalling. The major contributor to society's stunning ignorance of science has been our educational system. The inability of students to appreciate the scope, meaning, and limitations of science reflects our conventional lecture-oriented curriculum with its emphasis on passive learning. The student's traditional role is that of a passive note-taker and regurgitator of factual information. What is urgently needed is an educational program in which students become interested in actively knowing, rather than passively believing.

More recently, Halpern and Hakel ( 32) observed that "....it would be difficult to design an educational model that is more at odds with current research on human cognition than the one that is used in most colleges and universities." Apparently, not much has changed since 1984.

It would seem that we need to do something to change the way that science is taught, and we need to do it now.

At the same time that reforms are being proposed, there is a growing call to base educational decision making on evidence from high-quality educational research ("evidence-based education"). At the K-12 level, this is now a matter of national legislation. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 (Ref. 38a; see www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html if you want to read all 670 pages of this legislation) mandates that federally funded programs be based on rigorous scientific research, and the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 ( 38) essentially describes what constitutes rigorous research paradigms in education. Eisenhart and Towne ( 23) have published a very useful discussion of the implications these two pieces of legislation.

In the sphere of medical education, Van der Vleuten, Dolmans and Sherpbier ( 106), and Murray ( 74) have pointed out the need for a research base for reform in medical education. Norman ( 81) has raised some cautions about the problems of doing this research but clearly supports the need for such data. The National Research Council report of Scientific Research in Education ( 78) is an in-depth discussion of how meaningful data about teaching and learning should be obtained.

As scientists, we have been trained to make decisions based on evidence, and it is appropriate to ask where the evidence is that these proposed new approaches to teaching and learning, these reforms, work any better than the old approaches from which we all learned and from which our students seem to be learning. The short answer is that there IS evidence out there and that it does support the claims made by advocates of reform. The purpose of this article is to present some of that evidence and discuss its applicability to physiology teaching. I will first present some of the relevant evidence from the sciences basic to education (cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and the learning sciences) and then present some of the evidence that comes from some science disciplines. I will also try to provide a road map to help in finding the relevant literature and some guidelines in reading it critically.

Like any of the scientific fields with which we are most familiar, educational research is generating an ever-growing data base, and it is becoming increasing difficult to keep up with the literature. It is not feasible to review every topic relevant to physiology teaching and learning, and the exclusion of any topics (authentic assessment, the uses of computers, or the importance of animal use in the student laboratory) does not mean that they are unimportant. Not everything could be included here.

The references cited here are a necessarily idiosyncratic selection, with one of the selection criteria being the accessibility of the sources cited (for example, no conference proceedings, which in the fields discussed here are very common, have been included). I have also tried to identify monographs and review articles that are particularly relevant, but I have also included some of the original articles reporting important results. Unlike fields such as molecular biology or physiologic genomics, "old" findings in educational research continue to be germane today, and the work cited here spans the last 40 years of research.

What Is Active Learning and What Are These New Approaches to Learning?

What are the specific reforms or "innovative" approaches to teaching that "...more actively involve the student in the learning process?" Table 1 contains a partial list of such approaches to learning taken from Michael and Modell ( 61); each is discussed (to varying extents) in the discussion that follows.

The approaches to teaching listed in Table 1 are commonly said to involve "active learning" and to be "student centered." These terms have been succinctly defined as follows ( 18):

Active Learning. The process of having students engage in some activity that forces them to reflect upon ideas and how they are using those ideas. Requiring students to regularly assess their own degree of understanding and skill at handling concepts or problems in a particular discipline. The attainment of knowledge by participating or contributing. The process of keeping students mentally, and often physically, active in their learning through activities that involve them in gathering information, thinking, and problem solving.

Student-Centered Instruction. Student-centered instruction [SCI] is an instructional approach in which students influence the content, activities, materials, and pace of learning. This learning model places the student (learner) in the center of the learning process. The instructor provides students with opportunities to learn independently and from one another and coaches them in the skills they need to do so effectively. The SCI approach includes such techniques as substituting active learning experiences for lectures, assigning open-ended problems and problems requiring critical or creative thinking that cannot be solved by following text examples, involving students in simulations and role plays, and using self-paced and/or cooperative (team-based) learning. Properly implemented SCI can lead to increased motivation to learn, greater retention of knowledge, deeper understanding, and more positive attitudes towards the subject being taught.

Pedersen and Liu ( 85) point out that "student centered" is usually defined in opposition to "teacher centered," and Barr and Tagg ( 6) have discussed a change in the educational paradigm from one that focuses on teaching to one that focuses on learning. For example, a conventional lecture-based course is said to be teacher centered because of the view that what matters most in determining what is learned is what the teacher does in the lecture hall. It is, of course, understood that what the students do in response to the teacher's lectures matters, but the focus is on the teacher in the front of the classroom. A student-centered learning environment is one in which the attention is on what the students are doing, and it is the students' behavior that is the significant determinant of what is learned. Again, it is acknowledged that what the teacher does matters greatly (after all, it is the teacher who designs and implements the learning environment), but the attention here is firmly on the students.

Alexander and Murphy ( 1) have discussed the research behind learner-centered approaches, and Walczyk and Ramsey ( 108) have described the application this approach in college science classrooms.

What is it that the students should be doing in a typical student-centered active learning environment? Michael and Modell ( 61) have described the process as building mental models of whatever is being learned, consciously and deliberately testing those models to determine whether they work, and then repairing those models that appear to be faulty. This description seems consonant with the definition of active learning previously presented. Students learning in this way are more likely to be achieving meaningful learning ( 5, 59, 60, 68, 82).

Evidence From the Learning Sciences, Cognitive Science, and Educational Psychology Supporting Active Learning

How do we know that student-centered, active learning approaches work and that they work better than conventional, teacher-centered, usually passive approaches?

There have been several attempts to collate and summarize research findings from psychology and other fields that relate to teaching and learning. Lambert and McCombs in 1998 ( 44) and Bransford et al. in 1999 ( 11) have both published important books in which these findings are summarized. The Bransford et al. book, in particular, has been very influential in shaping the thinking of the education community. These works, and there are many others, deal with learning across all the disciplines. Michael and Modell ( 61) have reviewed our current understanding of the learning process and discussed key ideas about learning that apply to active learning in the science classroom.

The following are brief descriptions of some of the key findings that need to be incorporated in our thinking as we make decisions about teaching physiology at any educational level. These ideas are accepted by essentially all researchers ( 11, 44), although the comments here are somewhat simplified. No attempt has been made to describe all of the controversies that remain unresolved. I have underlined some of the key terms that occur in this literature because their use is essential in doing electronic searches for additional information.

1. Learning involves the active construction of meaning by the learner.

This is the fundamental tenet of " constructivism," the dominant paradigm in psychology and the learning sciences. As Driver et al. ( 22) state, "The view that knowledge cannot be transmitted but must be constructed by the mental activity of learners underpins contemporary perspectives on science education." Learners construct meaning from the old information and models that they have (the foundation, if you will) and the new information they acquire, and they do so by linking the new information to that which they already know. The construction of meaning is facilitated by making multiple links between the information being acquired and the existing store of information. Information and meaning (whether old or new) are assembled into mental modelsor representations. One technique that is known to help students build useful mental models is concept mapping ( 83). Building multiple models or representation facilitates meaningful learning ( 68) or learning with understanding ( 98).

It follows, then, that to the extent that old knowledge and old models are faulty, meaningful learning will be compromised. These faulty or flawed mental models are referred to by a variety of terms, with the terms " misconceptions" or " alternative conceptions" perhaps carrying the fewest specific implications. The review by Wandersee et al. ( 27) is a good starting point for understanding this phenomenon. Modell et al. ( 71) have discussed some of the problems with the terminology that is used in this field and also presented some of the reasons for attempting to diagnose the presence of misconceptions in one's students. Learning can be thought about as a process of conceptual change in which faulty or incomplete models are repaired ( 46, 99, 110). "Fixing" faulty mental models, or misconceptions, is universally recognized as being extremely difficult to accomplish, although there are an increasing array of techniques that have been shown to help. Smith et al. ( 100) and Chi ( 14) have presented some interesting and potentially useful thoughts about misconceptions and their remediation.

2. Learning facts ("what"-declarative knowledge) and learning to do something ("how"-procedural knowledge) are two different processes.

Ryle ( 94) was perhaps the first to point out the difference between "knowing that" something is true and "knowing how" to do something. In psychology ( 2), this has come to be referred to as the difference between declarative knowledge ("knowing that") and procedural knowledge ("knowing how"). It is increasing clear that the challenge of learning the facts about a physiological mechanism is quite different than the challenge of learning to solve problems with those facts. So, if you expect students to use knowledge to solve any kind of problem, you must provide them with opportunities to practice the needed skills and receive feedback about their performance. Romiszowski ( 92) has reviewed what is now known about learning a physical (psychomotor) skill and has stated the principles that apply to this learning task. Table 2 contains some of Romiszowski's "rules" for promoting skills learning and describes their application to learning problem-solving skills. Segal and Chipman ( 96) have assembled an interesting collection of articles on teaching problem-solving skills.

3. Some things that are learned are specific to the domain or context (subject matter or course) in which they were learned, whereas other things are more readily transferred to other domains.

Transfer ( 86) is said to occur when learning of one subject or topic (or in one context) affects learning in another subject or topic (or in a different context). It is important to note that transfer can be either positive or negative, although most discussions of transfer focus solely on positive transfer because this is obviously the desired outcome of learning.

All aspects of transfer continue be quite controversial ( 33, 56): What does it mean, How does one determine whether it has occurred, What conditions promote it, and What conditions hinder its occurrence? However, the issue is so central to all discussions of learning that it is essential that it be considered.

For example, in teaching physiology, there are at least two different issues in which transfer, or failure to transfer, is of great significance. Physiology is a science that is based on physics and chemistry. To understand many important physiological phenomena requires that students be able to apply an understanding of physics (the electrical properties of membrane or the mechanical properties of the lungs and chest wall) or chemistry (action of hormones, digestion, and acid/base balance). However, it is certainly NOT uncommon to observe that regardless of students' prior physics and chemistry courses, they are unable to apply what they know in learning physiology ( 42); transfer often fails to occur. There is another way in which the occurrence or failure of transfer is relevant in physiology education. When students learn the relationships among pressure, flow, and resistance in the circulation (hemodynamics), it is reasonable to expect some transfer so that their understanding of airflow in the respiratory tree comes more easily or more quickly. However, here too it is common to observe that there may be little or no evidence of transfer. Modell ( 69) has advocated the explicit development of what he calls general models or common themes to promote this kind of transfer.

4. Individuals are likely to learn more when they learn with others than when they learn alone.

There are now a great many different approaches to facilitating students learning together (as opposed to learning individually). Labels such as cooperative learning, collaborative learning, peer learning, or problem-based learning each describe a different approach to getting students to learn together. Bossert ( 10), Lunetta ( 29), and Blumenfeld et al. ( 9) have provided useful overviews of some, but not all, of these approaches, their theoretical bases, and the research that supports them. Johnson et al. ( 39) have published a meta-analysis of 164 studies of cooperative learning methods; they conclude that there is solid evidence in these studies to support the benefits of cooperative learning.

In the disciplines, there are impressive results that support the power of getting students to work together to learn. In the field of computer-aided instruction, there is a wealth of data showing that two or more students working together at the computer learn more than students working alone ( 40, 93). In physics, students generate better solutions to problems when they work cooperative than when they work alone ( 34), and peer instruction, developed by Mazur ( 51), has been shown to increase student mastery of conceptual reasoning and quantitative problem solving ( 20). In chemistry, students in cooperative learning groups show increased retention and higher scores on assessments than students learning the same material in conventional ways ( 21).

Michael and Modell ( 61) have argued that the similarities that these approaches share are more important than their differences. While there can be little doubt that students working together learn more, the key issue now is how to implement small group work to achieve maximum learning ( 17).

It is worth noting that there are many factors in a cooperative learning environment, whatever its specific format, that are thought to contribute to the success achieved. One of these is clearly the requirement that participants talk to one another, articulating their understanding of the subject matter, and asking and answering questions. As will be discussed below, these behaviors are now known to facilitate learning in all disciplines.

5. Meaningful learning is facilitated by articulating explanations, whether to one's self, peers, or teachers.

It is a common belief that a central part of learning any discipline is learning the language of that discipline (Ref. 45 has an extended discussion of this idea, and Ref. 25 discusses a variety of language-related issues in tutoring students to solve cardiovascular problems). Learning a language requires practice using that language, and it is thus important that students have the opportunity to both hear (and read) and speak (or write) the language of the discipline being learned. Evens and Michael ( 25) have discussed the importance of language in learning cardiovascular physiology, whether from a human or a computer tutor. However, there is a more specific benefit of encouraging students to explicitly articulate their understanding of a topic. A large body of research, much of it by Chi ( 15, 16), has demonstrated that articulating self-explanations and using self-explanation improves learning. Rivard and Straw ( 91) have demonstrated that both talking about and writing about ecological concepts improves meaningful learning and retention.

The five "big" ideas described here represent the "basic science" foundation for teaching and learning that should form the basis for what we do to help our students learn, whether in our classrooms or outside of them. In the next section, I will review some of the applications of these ideas (and the results of some research) in four science disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, and physiology.

Evidence About Active Learning From Education in the Sciences

Over the last 30 years, there has been a rising tide of research carried out within the science disciplines aimed at understanding and promoting the teaching and learning in the disciplines. This research ranges from "laboratory" experiments (in which student learning outcomes are studied outside of the classroom and in a context divorced from a specific course) to classroom experiments (in which learning outcomes in a specific course/classroom are measured) to curricular experiments (in which approaches to learning than span a whole curriculum are compared). The "basic" research in the previous section represents a starting point for all of these studies. However, there is also a very rapidly growing body of work that addresses the specific problems and issues related to teaching and learning science. Some relevant books that review different aspects of this field are by Gabel ( 27), Gardner et al. ( 29), Glynn et al. ( 30), Minstrell and van Zee ( 65), and Mintzes et al. ( 68).

It is not possible to summarize all of this literature. Rather, I have attempted to describe some important themes underlying research on teaching and learning in four different fields and have cited some of the more interesting examples of work in these areas.

Physics.

There is a long history of educational research being done by the physics education community, and a long history of attempts to reform the teaching of physics. Some of the first, and still most striking, demonstrations of misconceptions were uncovered in the domain of Newtonian motion (Ref. 52 discusses this early work).

This work on physics misconceptions led in a fairly direct way to the development of the force concept inventory (FCI) by Hestenes ( 35, 36), an assessment tool that focuses on students' understanding of the concepts of physics rather than the ability to analyze problems and solve them using equations. There are now a number of similar inventories in other areas of physics.

The availability of an assessment tool like the FCI has provided a valuable tool for the classroom teacher ( 95), but it has also provided a valuable tool for the educational research community. Although there are controversies about the FCI, it has provided a measure of student conceptual learning that can be used in asking questions about the efficacy of different approaches to teaching physics. One of the most striking findings ( 31) came from a comparison of the learning outcomes (as measured by the FCI and a related inventory on mechanics) from 14 traditional courses (2,084 students) and 48 courses using "interactive-engagement" (active learning) techniques (4,458 students). The results on the FCI assessment showed that students in the interactive-engagement courses outperformed students in the traditional courses by 2 SDs. Similarly, students in the interactive-engagement courses outperformed students in the traditional courses on the mechanics assessment, a measure of problem-solving ability. This certainly looks like evidence that active learning works!

Research in physics education is having a profound effect on the development of instructional materials. Research to determine what students know and can do and what they don't know or can't do in the domain of electricity by McDermott's group ( 53) has thus led to the development of instructional materials by this same group that do a better job of helping students master this subject matter ( 97). A similar approach has been pursued in the domain of optics ( 112). The interactive-engagement physics courses studied by Hake ( 31) used instructional approaches based on research findings from within the physics education community.

Chemistry.

Educational research in chemistry has focused quite strongly on uncovering the misconceptions that students at all educational levels (K-graduate school) bring to the chemistry classroom. One of the best reviews, or catalogs, of these misconceptions has been assembled by Kind ( 41). As the understanding of the prevalence and robustness of these misconceptions has been clarified, much attention has been turned to the efficacy of various teaching techniques to help students repair their faulty mental models. Towns and Grant ( 105) have studied the effects of cooperative learning and reported that students believe that it significantly contributed to a greater understanding of the concepts of physical chemistry. Niaz et al. ( 79) demonstrated that greater conceptual understanding resulted from using a teaching approach that included student generated arguments/counterarguments than from conventional approaches. Quílez-Pardo and Solaz-Portolés ( 88) have shown that the teacher's own misconceptions about equilibrium contributes to the misconceptions that students have about this same phenomenon.

Chemistry, like physics, is a discipline in which the ability to solve problems is regarded as an essential part of mastering the discipline. Studies of problem solving in chemistry by experts and novices (students) have a long history, and Gabel and Bunce ( 27) have provided a comprehensive review of some of the early work on this topic.

Finally, a great deal of thought has gone into a variety of issue about the chemistry curriculum...what ought to be taught, to whom, when, and how. The pages of the Journal of Chemistry Education are filled with articles discussing the many issues that arise. In almost all cases, the discussion of these issues is grounded in the growing understanding of the problems that students have in learning chemistry.

Biology.

Biology is a very large discipline, as a look at any recent biology textbook will attest. It is also a highly integrative science in three quite different ways. First, biology builds on and depends on other disciplines such as physics and chemistry. Second, the subject areas encompassed by biology relate to one another in a way that is different than the way in which the subareas of physics relate to each other; physiology and histology clearly overlap and integrate ideas from each other in a way that electricity/magnetism and mechanics do not. Finally, understanding biology requires students to be able to deal with phenomena at multiple levels at the same time: molecules to cells to organs to whole organisms.

The result is that any discussion of teaching and learning biology must recognize that students' understanding (or misconceptions) about physics, chemistry, and other topics in biology will impact student learning about the particular biology topic of interest. It also means that active learning techniques must target physics and chemistry misconceptions as well as biology misconceptions. Michael et al. ( 63) have shown that at least some student misconceptions about cardiovascular phenomena are the result of the inability to apply certain general physical models (pressure/flow/resistance, for example) to physiological phenomena.

There is a long history of studies of children's understanding of biological concepts that goes back to Piaget. One particularly fruitful topic of investigation has been children's understanding of the cardiovascular system ( 3, 67) and how their views evolve into the misconceptions that are present when students enter our classrooms. There have also been a number of studies of student misconceptions about photosynthesis ( 29, 47, 67).

The use of a variety of pedagogical treatments to help students repair misconceptions and to develop more appropriate concepts (a process referred to as conceptual change; see Refs. 46 and 99) have been explored by biology teachers and researchers. Concept mapping, written about extensively by Novak ( 83), is one technique that has been extensively explored, perhaps because the nature of biological knowledge lends itself to the hierarchical organization of ideas. Briscoe and LaMaster ( 12) have described one attempt to help students achieve meaningful learning with concept mapping and reported some significant success. Eisobu and Soyibo ( 24) have described a more complex study with more quantitative measures; they found significant learning gains with concept mapping. A volume by Fisher et al. ( 26) has described the uses of concept mapping in biology to achieve a number of educational goals.

Two other instructional techniques that are said to encourage active learning have also been explored. Discovery-based or inquiry-based learning is a powerful pedagogical approach that has much evidence supporting its use. These approaches are characterized as exhibiting ( 49) the following:

1. a focus on ideas and concepts, rather than on conceptually unrelated pieces of information;

2. a strong activity-participation component where students [are] motivated to "learn by doing;"

3. an emphasis on learning the methods of verifying and testing hypotheses in each field; and

4. the idea that content and process are inseparable components of learning.

The volume edited by McNeal and D'Avanzo ( 55) contains many examples of the application of these ideas in what they refer to as "student-active" science. Svinicki ( 103) has provided a brief overview of discovery learning for the physiology community.

Support for discovery learning is provided by a study in which students engaged in a course that incorporated some discovery learning exercises were tested, and their performance on questions related to topics learned through discovery learning was compared with their performance on questions related to topics learned in lecture ( 111). The authors concluded that performance was better on those topics learned through discovery learning.

Peer collaboration is another technique that has a sound theoretical basis, and students learning about photosynthesis in collaborative groups were found to have performed better than students learning alone ( 47).

One final report is worth noting. Burrowes ( 13) compared learning outcomes in two sections of the same course taught by the same teacher. One section was taught in the traditional teacher-centered manner (control group of 100 students), whereas the other section was taught in a manner that was based on constructivist ideas (experimental group of 104 students). The results of this experiment were striking: the mean exam scores of the experimental group were significantly higher than those of the control group, and students in the experimental group did better on questions that specifically tested their ability to "think like a scientist."

We can certainly conclude that active learning, however the teacher "engineers" that experience for his or her students, works.

Physiology.

Readers of this journal do not need to be told that the physiology education community has begun to make significant contributions to research on teaching and learning. With apologies in advance to those colleagues whose papers I do not cite, here is a sampling of the kinds of issues related to teaching and learning physiology that are currently being explored and have been published in Advances in Physiology Education.

The exploration of misconceptions about physiology held by students has begun, and the findings are similar to those in other fields of study ( 37, 58, 90). Given that you know that students in your class are likely to have a misconception, what can you do to help them repair their faulty mental model? Studies of the use of laboratory experiences to repair misconceptions have been carried out by Modell et al. ( 72, 73) and suggest easily implemented teaching paradigms that might help. A sophisticated concept mapping procedure for exploring students understanding of pulmonary physiology has been reported ( 54) and shows promise of providing a novel and useful assessment tool for conceptual understanding. Peer tutoring is a teaching technique that has had much support in the educational research literature, and Lake ( 43) has shown that it helps students learn physiology. Problem-based learning ( 7) is an approach to learning that has been adopted by many medical schools around the world. Mierson ( 64) has described an undergraduate physiology course taught in a problem-based learning mode, and Correa et al. ( 19) have described an interesting application of problem-based learning in a pathophysiology course. Finally, one last example of a topic that is being vigorously researched is computer-based approaches to reaching and learning, and Rawson and Quinlan ( 89) have reported on the outcomes of using such a program in the domain of acid-base balance.

For some reason, cognitive scientists and learning scientists have done relatively little work with issues of teaching and learning in physiology, but there have been some interesting studies. Spiro and associates ( 107) have looked at complex misconceptions and the use of analogies to help students correct them. Their results offer a cautionary note to the common use of analogies in teaching science: oversimplified analogies can be a source of student misconceptions. Odom and Barrow ( 84) have studied students' conceptual understanding of diffusion and osmosis and have developed an assessment tool for this knowledge domain. Finally, there has been interesting work about students' teleological thinking and what exactly it means ( 104, 113); in some cases, the problem arises out lack of fluency in the language of physiology, not in a faulty mental model. This is certainly an issue that has particular resonance with physiology teachers.

So, while teaching and learning issues in physiology have only recently begun to be explored, progress is being made, and the physiology teaching community itself is at the forefront.

An Important Caveat: Active Learning Doesn't Just Happen

Active learning, student-centered pedagogical approaches put the focus on the learner and what the learner does. However, active learning doesn't just happen; it occurs in the classroom when the teacher creates a learning environment that makes it more likely to occur (see Refs. 55, 61, and 70 for ideas that can be used in your classroom). Implementing these newer approaches to teaching requires the teacher to become a learner, because if these approaches aren't implemented in a well thought out way, their outcomes will certainly not meet expectations.

Thus, one of the critical issues is faculty development, helping teachers to become familiar with new approaches to teaching and helping them gain experience actually implementing them. There are many avenues for such faculty development and much discussion in the literature about these issues, but this is not the place to pursue this topic.

Problems of Doing Research on Teaching and Learning

Active learning works. It should be clear that there are large bodies of evidence from a number of different fields supporting the effectiveness of active learning, although only a sampling of the results could be presented here. However, there are two additional issues that must be addressed. How applicable is the evidence and how sound is it?

Much research on school learning of science has been done with K-12 students as subjects. There is a growing body of research with undergraduates, and a more limited amount of research has been done with medical and other professional students. However, many, but admittedly not all, of the issues about learning and teaching science are common to all educational levels. So, results from experiments or studies with middle school children learning science ARE relevant to understanding how medical students learn physiology (and vis a versa).

It is also important to recognize that while learning physiology has many important similarities with learning physics (or anatomy), there are also important differences that are the consequence of the significant differences between the various science disciplines.

Thus, it would be unreasonable to expect that the results from educational research involving students very different from your students learning a discipline different than your discipline will translate into a recipe for how you should teach in your classroom. But, the mass of accumulating evidence for all grade levels and disciplines certainly should be used to guide your decision making about how to best help your students learn your discipline.

That said, it is important to recognize that educational research is difficult to do; this has been cogently highlighted by Berliner ( 8) in "Educational research: the hardest science of them all." Berliner points out that unlike a physics experiment, in which it is possible to readily distinguish between the independent and dependent variables, and also possible to isolate and control all of the independent variables, in educational experiments all of this is problematic. Researchers may not agree on which variable is the dependent variable of greatest interest or importance. There may be disagreements about which independent variable(s) are to be manipulated. There may be disagreements about how to measure any of the relevant variables. And, finally, it may be extremely difficult, or even impossible, to isolate and manipulate all the variables suspected of being involved in the phenomena being studied.

Norman ( 81) and Murray ( 74) have outlined some of the problems with doing research in medical education. The problems they identified are, of course, no different than those outlined by Berliner ( 8).

Evens and Michael ( 25) have discussed how these difficulties affected their studies of one-on-one human tutoring in cardiovascular physiology and their attempts to determine the effectiveness of a computer tutor operating in this same domain.

The consequence is that conclusions from "laboratory" educational experiments (where better control of the variables is possible) may appear quite robust, but results from "classroom" experiments (where all of the difficulties of controlling variables are present) may look much less robust and convincing. Furthermore, it is often difficult to transfer the findings of laboratory experiments to the classroom precisely because there are so many uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) variables in the classroom context. Finally, results from a particular student population (course, classroom, or institution) may not transfer well to a different context (course or class) for the same reasons.

It is also clear that there are significant problems with replicating experiments, more so for classroom experiments than for laboratory experiments. The reason for this is the fundamental difficulty of identifying and controlling those variables that may affect the outcomes of the experiment. If there are six variables that describe the system being studied, but you can only identify and control four of them, each time you attempt to replicate an experiment there is a high probability that the system you are studying now is different than the system on which the initial results were obtained.

It is fair to say, then, that the results of educational research are rarely as definitive has the results from physiology experiments. Nevertheless, as I hope this review has shown, there is an enormous wealth of research supporting the benefits of active learning in helping students master difficult subjects. Those of us charged with helping students learn physiology need to know about this research and incorporate the ideas from the learning sciences in our thinking about how we teach. I would also urge that we all think about what contributions we can make to furthering the acquisition of knowledge about teaching and learning physiology.

How to Stay Abreast of Developments in This Field

Michael ( 57) has provided a list of education and other related journals that regularly publish articles relevant to life science education. Table 3 contains a partial listing of these journals. Matlin ( 50) has produced an annotated bibliography of books and articles on a number of topics related to college teaching in all disciplines, both science and nonscience.

It is obvious from the list of journals shown in Table 3 that many, if not most, of the professional science societies support and promote research and thinking about teaching and learning within their discipline (see Table 4). National (and sometimes regional) meetings of these societies can provide access to the latest results and thinking about issues related to teaching and learning. Conference proceedings (in some cases, published commercially) provide valuable archives of current work.

Conclusions

There IS evidence that active learning, student-centered approaches to teaching physiology work, and they work better than more passive approaches. There is no single definitive experiment to prove this, nor can there be given the nature of the phenomena at work, but the very multiplicity of sources of evidence makes the argument compelling.

Therefore, we should all begin to reform our teaching, employing those particular approaches to fostering active learning that match the needs of our students, our particular courses, and our own teaching styles and personalities. There are plenty of options from which we can choose, so there is no reason not to start. This will mean that we too becomes learners in the classroom.

As scientists, we would never think of writing a grant proposal without a thorough knowledge of the relevant literature, nor would we go into the laboratory to actually do an experiment without knowing about the most current methodologies being employed in the field ( 59). Yet, all too often, when we go into the classroom to teach, we assume that nothing more than our expert knowledge of the discipline and our accumulated experiences as students and teachers are required to be a competent teacher. But this makes no more sense in the classroom than it would in the laboratory!

The time has come for all of us to practice "evidence-based" teaching.

The author thanks Dr. Harold Modell for critical reading of the manuscript. As is always the case, Dr. Modell's insights had a significant influence on the author's thoughts about this paper. The author also thanks Dr. Dee Silverthorn, who made valuable suggestions that were incorporated into the paper.

Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: J. Michael, Dept. of Molecular Biophysics and Physiology, Rush Medical College, Chicago, IL 60612 (e-mail: [email protected] )

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Where's the evidence that active learning works?

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the publication of " A Nation at Risk: the Imperative for Reform" by the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983 ( 75) was only the first of many recent calls for the reform of K-12 science education in the United States.

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Active Learning Strategies to Overcome Teaching Problems

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Active Learning Strategies to Overcome Teaching Problems

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This is an extremely easy to read and reference pdf on which active learning strategy would best fit a teaching problem in the classroom. For instance, if the students are lacking motivation or engagement, it suggests three active learning strategies to overcome the issue, Students-as-Producers, Minute Papers or a student decision making activity that has small groups decide what is needed in an authentic situation.

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This is a pdf of a listing and brief description of 228 active learning strategies. These interactive techniques include a wide array, from techniques to engage students to full activities like a reverse Socratic discussion.

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This article discusses active learning strategies with the additional challenge of social distancing and online learning. The strategies include group work modifications as well as new technological tools that answer the challenges of online active learning.

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If you've read Norman Clark's hypothetical day in the life of a physically distanced classroom, then you've probably started to worry about how faculty and other instructors might facilitate discussion, group work, and other forms of active learning this fall. If I'm standing at the front of the classroom with half or a third of my students in the room with me, but sitting six feet apart from each other and wearing masks, while the rest of my students are joining class by videoconference, what strategies might I employ to engage all of my students in meaningful learning?

I'm going to try to outline some options here in this blog post, drawing on ideas and resources from across the higher education community, but I would enthusiastically welcome additional approaches in the comments below or via Hypothesis annotations.

First, let's take a big-picture view of fall courses on many college and university campuses this fall. We're likely to see perhaps a handful of courses fully in-person, more courses fully online, and a significant number of courses taught in some kind of hybrid or blended fashion. See these infographics from the Office of Teaching Effectiveness and Innovation (OTEI) at Clemson University for a useful overview of options. Decisions about modalities will be made at a number of levels (department, school, university) for a number of different reasons (safety, pedagogy, student access). I'm happy to talk (elsewhere) about the pros and cons of these decisions, but for the purposes of this blog post, I'm assuming faculty have opted into or been required to teach in some blended or hybrid manner, one which will feature synchronous class sessions with a mix of in-person and online students. To be clear, I'm not arguing for classrooms structured this way; I'm just being realistic that many instructors will be facing them this fall.

I'm also assuming a few practical things:

For instance, let's assume that the online students are visible and audible to the in-person students, either because the instructor is projecting the videoconference on the big screen at the front of the room or because the in-person students are also logged into the videoconference, perhaps with their audio muted or on ear buds.

I'm also assuming that all the students are able to participate synchronously. This is a pretty big assumption-it's quite likely that there will be students who can't participate synchronously for various reasons. How to engage those students equitably is an important conversation, but that will have to happen in a future blog post.

And I'm assuming that in-person students have some kind of digital device (laptop, tablet, phone) they can use to participate. There are some low-tech strategies in what follows, but, in general, this is not the semester to ban digital devices in your classroom.

One more note before we look at strategies... Teaching and learning in these kinds of classrooms will be challenging. Here's some advice from Allison Leich Hilbun, a senior lecturer in biological sciences here at Vanderbilt:

"I feel like engaging students can be helped by having honest conversations with the students about how they are feeling about this novel approach to learning. Even stopping class to ask how students feel emotionally and whether or not they feel connected could potentially help foster social connections and comfort with the new system."

Being student-centered in our approaches to teaching means talking with our students about their experiences as learners and trying to understand and then meet their needs. Be prepared to have these conversations regularly during your course, as you and your students adapt to changing conditions.

Now, let's talk about strategies...

This may be one of the more challenging activities to conduct in a hybrid and socially distanced classroom. Why? It will likely be hard for the students participating virtually to hear contributions made by students participating in-person. The virtual students will presumably be able to hear the instructor through a microphone, but without extra microphones to pick up the voices of the students in the room, it's not clear how the virtual students will hear the in-person students. Some rooms may have the audio equipment to pick up in-person students, but many classrooms won't have that kind of gear and it's not clear yet how well those extra mics will work for students who may be speaking through masks.

Could students in the room use their laptops or phones to participate in the videoconference? Unlikely, given some preliminary testing done by the Pepperdine University Center for Teaching Excellence. They found that having multiple people in the same room on the same videoconference led to unpleasant audio feedback. Without some more advanced hardware or an organized way to have all participants except one mute their devices, this doesn't look like a solid option.

If you, dear reader, have ideas for conducting classwide discussions in the hybrid and socially distanced classroom, please share! In the meantime, let's consider some other strategies.

One simple way to engage students in the room and on the Zoom call is to use a live polling tool to ask them questions about the course material. Back in the day, we used "clickers" for this type of live polling, but these days we have lots of options for classroom response systems. One option would be to use whatever polling feature your videoconferencing tool provides. Zoom polls, for instance, let you ask multiple-choice and multiple-mark questions pretty easily. This would mean your in-person students would need to be in the Zoom session, which has advantages. But if your Zoom screen is getting too busy, you could have your in-person students turn off their cameras; Zoom can hide participants who don't have their cameras on.

If having your in-person students in the videoconference is hard, or if you'd like to ask more complex questions (free-response, clickable image questions, and so on), you could shift to a second platform like Poll Everywhere (free for a limited number of students) or Top Hat ( free for all Vanderbilt faculty). This adds a little overhead for instructors and virtual students (now you have to manage, say, Zoom and Top Hat windows), but if you're going to use polling regularly, that learning curve might be worth it.

What kinds of questions might you ask? Well, gosh, I wrote a book on that. But if you'd like a primer, see my 2009 essay " Multiple-Choice Questions You Wouldn't Put on a Test," which discusses one-best-answer questions, student perspective questions, and misconception questions, or read through my blog posts about classroom response systems.

The text chat that likely comes with your videoconferencing tool can be used to host what is called a backchannel for class discussion. The spoken dialog between you and your in-person or online students forms the "frontchannel," while the text chat provides a forum for supplemental discussions among students. A backchannel can be useful for fostering dialog and even a sense of community among your in-person and online students. It can also serve some universal design purposes by providing a written alternative to spoken discussions or an ad hoc text captioning of spoken conversations.

Note that, as with live polling, if your videoconferencing tool's built-in chat tool isn't suitable, you could add a second platform like Slack, Discord, GroupMe, or Microsoft Teams. These platforms can also be useful outside of class time for less formal communication among students and instructors. Note also that for some videoconferencing platforms (e.g. Zoom), if a student drops the call and then re-enters the session, they lose the earlier text chat, which is another reason to use a second platform.

Monitoring and responding to the backchannel can be a challenge for instructors, of course, whose attention can only be split so many ways. I recommend appointing someone to be the "voice of the chat." This person could be a rotating student or a teaching assistant or a faculty colleague (maybe you can return the favor in their class). Their job is to monitor the backchannel and look for questions or comments that should be brought to the attention of the instructor. I like to plan "voice of the chat" moments in my lesson where I call on this person to speak up and share these questions and comments, and I'll even signal these moments in my slides, using a graphic like the one seen here.

It's a good idea to talk with your students about how to use the backchannel productively during class sessions. You might want to establish some community norms about appropriate text chat use. You might also want to direct students' contributions to the backchannel with some guiding questions. For some ideas, see my 2010 blog post " Backchannel in Education - Nine Uses."

If audio is a challenge in your fall classroom, that is, if it is hard to hear students who are socially distanced and wearing masks, then the backchannel + voice of the chat combo might be particularly useful. If you have a microphone to share with your voice of the chat, you could invite all students to share their questions and comments on the backchannel, then rely on the voice of the chat to vocalize those questions with you and the entire class using the mic.

A variation on the backchannel approach is collaborative notetaking. This typically involves setting up a Google Doc for students to use during class to take notes on the class discussion. Often, two or three students are appointed lead notetakers for a given class session, with that duty rotating among students over the semester, but all students are invited to read and contribute to the shared notes.

This approach provides a structure for active listening during class-notetakers don't participate in the discussion but try to capture all of it they can, while the rest of the students can focus on participating in discussion without having to worry about taking notes-and might be particularly valuable in a classroom where it is hard to hear some students, especially if the notetakers are scattered throughout the socially distanced classroom..

Live polling, backchannel, and collaborative notetaking are useful activities that don't require students to leave their physical or virtual seats. But what about group work in a hybrid classroom where the in-person students aren't free to move around the classroom? Let's consider a possible scenario:

You have three discussion questions for your students to consider in small groups. Under normal circumstances, you might have posted these questions in a PowerPoint slide or included them in a printed handout. In your hybrid classroom, however, you've put your three questions at the top of a Google Sheet, one question per column. You ask your students to get into groups of two or three, with the in-person groups sitting six feet apart from each other at tables and your online students moving to breakout rooms in your videoconferencing platform. You give your students some time to discuss the questions in groups and report their answers using the Google Sheet, with each small group selecting an unused row of the spreadsheet to document their answers.

Ordinarily you might circulate among your students as they work to eavesdrop and ask a few questions. That's not feasible now, but the Google Sheet serves a similar purpose. As the students work, you keep an eye on the sheet, monitoring your students' progress through the activity (so you know when to call time) and getting a sense of their responses (so you can plan the debrief at the end of the activity). When the group work is over, you highlight a few student responses to share with the full group (either yourself or by asking the loudest group member to speak) along with your comments reflecting on and synthesizing the student ideas.

This approach has the advantage of engaging your in-person and online students in essentially the same activity. Your online students might actually have an easier time of it, if your in-person students find it difficult to talk at a distance and through masks. That said, having a collaborative document of some sort for the small groups to use gives them some options for handling the group conversation. For example, one group might assign each question to a different student to draft a response to, then switch up the questions for editing and revising. The coordination would happen through some simple, in-person communication, but the heavy lifting of responding would happen in the collaborative document. You might encourage group strategies like this one, if you find yourself in a classroom where students can't hear each other well.

Of course, Google Sheets is just one option for a way to organize and share student work. Other collaborative tools ( Google Docs, Google Slides) might work better for some activities. Consider also annotation tools ( Hypothesis, Perusall, NowComment, VoiceThread, ReClipped), virtual whiteboards ( Mural, Miro, Padlet), and spaces in your course management system. Different activities will benefit from different tools. You'll also want to consider whether you want each group to have its own virtual space for collaboration or have all the groups work in the same virtual space.

Sometimes you might want rather structured responses from students, using something like Sheets with its columns and rows is useful, and other times you might ask more open-ended questions, asking each student group to construct its own slide in a Google Slide deck. Note that the more structure you build into the activity, the faster you'll be able to parse and respond to student responses. In large classes, very structured options, like multiple-choice polling questions, are the most practical.

Note that moving to groups (in-person and online) and getting started using a collaborative tool will take students a little time. This isn't as simple as turning to your neighbor in a traditional classroom and discussing a question, but if you make the group tasks meaningful and use the same tools regularly, this approach to group work has the potential to be practical.

One note for those teaching in disciplines (like mathematics) where group work involves students seeing each other's written work: If you're able to equip students with individual small portable whiteboards and markers, these might make it easier for students to show their work to group members across a six-foot gap. And for students participating in group work virtually, if they're Zooming in using their phones, they can probably point their phones at their own handwritten work when they need to share with their groups.

Here's another spin on group work: Ask your in-person students to pair up with virtual students for a quick Zoom or FaceTime call. If all the in-person students are using earbuds or headphones and if you can solve the matching problem, this might be a practical way to include pair work during class time. And it has the added benefit of fostering community across your two groups of students.

Keep in mind general strategies for using group work, like the jigsaw approach. In a jigsaw, students participate in two rounds of small group activities. In the first round (sometimes called "focus groups"), each group of students is given a different reading or topic to discuss. In the second round ("task groups"), groups are reformed so that each new group has a representative from each of the first round groups. The tasks groups are then asked to bring to the conversation perspectives shared during the focus groups. In the hybrid classroom, each set of groups might be facilitated using the strategies mentioned above, and the second-round groups might be assigned intentionally so that in-person and virtual students interact.

Here's an activity that might actually work better in a hybrid classroom. The fishbowl is a class discussion strategy with a long history. In the classic formulation, an instructor would identify a small set of students who feel the same way about a topic. These students are instructed to make a circle with their chairs in the center of the room; they are in the fishbowl. They discuss the topic-how they think about it, why it's important to them, and so on-while the rest of the students listen; the other students are outside the fishbowl. Then the instructor asks the observers to summarize or paraphrase what they heard; students in the fishbowl can affirm or clarify these remarks. Then the students switch places and repeat the process. The strategy is meant to encourage empathy for other points of view, and can be particularly useful for addressing contentious topics.

With a few modifications, the fishbowl activity should work well in the hybrid classroom. Instead of selecting students for the fishbowl by their points of view, an instructor might select a subset of their online students to be the "fish." These students are asked to discuss the topic at hand from their various perspectives, while the other students (the in-person students and any remaining virtual students) listen and observe and (optionally) take notes in a collaborative document. After the fishbowl discussion, the observers then paraphrase or question or argue as appropriate to the topic, perhaps using their voices, the backchannel, or one of the group work structures mentioned above.

Running a fishbowl activity this way might not work as well at encouraging empathy, but it takes advantage of the fact that in a hybrid classroom the students in the room will likely have an easier time hearing the virtual students than the other way around. And if your hybrid class is structured so that you alternate which students attend in-person and which attend virtually, you can make sure that all students get the chance to be in the fishbowl over time.

There's evidence that physical movement can benefit cognitive functioning ( Ferrer and Laughlin, 2017). Although the socially distanced classroom might make moving around the room difficult, there still might be ways to incorporate physical movement in classes this fall. For instance, you might supplement a yes/no or agree/disagree polling question with some vertical movement by students, e.g. stand up if you agree, sit down if you don't. I can imagine some more colorful options here, too, like asking students who vote a certain way to dab.

Here's another idea, assuming you can access some office supplies: During a group work activity, students could jot down ideas or questions on Post-it notes and take turns affixing their notes to a group whiteboard or chalkboard. If the sticky notes and writing utensils are large enough (I'm fond of 5" x 7" notes and Sharpies), students in the group will be able to read the collected ideas. If not, one group member could take a photo of the notes with their phone and share it with the group.

It might be hard to require movement from your virtual students, but if you have one or more in-person students taking notes on the class discussion for later sharing with the class (via a Google Doc, for instance), some of your virtual students might enjoy going for a walk while they attend class, if they are able. Planning stretch breaks into long class sessions can be useful, too.
The strategies listed above are hopefully a useful starting point for planning hybrid and socially distanced classes this fall. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list! We encourage you to add your ideas in the comments below or via Hypothesis annotations. Credits: Several of the strategies and tools above, including the fishbowl activity, the ideas for physical movement, and some of the group work tools, were mentioned in the POD Network Google Group by Natalie Parker, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Texas Wesleyan University. Thanks to Natalie for sharing her ideas, and to my CFT colleague Heather Fedesco for helping to expand on those ideas. Thanks also to colleagues who provided helpful comments on a draft of this piece, including Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Nancy Chick, Joshua Eyler, Christopher Heard, Karen Costa, Kelly Hogan, Aimi Hamraie, and the faculty participants in the Center for Teaching's early-June Online Course Design Institute.
Tags: covid-19, Educational Technology, hybrid teaching, socially distanced teaching

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Active Learning in Hybrid and Physically Distanced Classrooms

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by Derek Bruff, Director If you've read Norman Clark's hypothetical day in the life of a physically distanced classroom, then you've probably started to worry about how faculty and other instructors might facilitate discussion, group work, and other forms of active learning this fall. If I'm standing at the front of the classroom with half...