Dear Reader, Although the content of this post is more specifically for the study of English Literature, the useful ideas can easily be adapted to suit a variety of studied subjects.
As a pedagogical theory, active learning is about making sure students are ‘actively’ engaged with their learning through reflection and application—as opposed to passive learning, which at its most extreme is about simply listening to an educator, and/or following instructions without being aware of why and how what they are doing is ‘learning’ in some respect.
What I discuss here is clearly related to this theory, but I offer my ideas at a more practical level to tackle an active-passive dynamic that all teachers experience in the classroom—the student who, for whatever reason, isn’t really engaging, or is coasting, trying to get through the lesson with not exactly no effort, but minimal effort if at all possible. It’s a highly familiar situation—who doesn’t have at least one student like that in almost every class they teach? When I talk about ‘active learning’ in this sense, then, I’m talking about delivering lessons that try to minimise this sort of apathy or low-level engagement. And who doesn’t want to do that?
Annotation Stations
Of course, if any student is actively learning in this sense, then they are far more likely to be actively learning in the other sense. Indeed, the principle of annotation stations (as I call them) leans on a simple but useful observation Jess Gifkins has made regarding the purposes of active learning; that ‘audience attention … wanes every 10-20 minutes’, and, therefore, educators should aim to ‘use a different approach to learning each 15 minutes, which means changing the way students are engaged’.
Variation, in one form or another, is central to the way I make use of annotation stations (AS), and this is so in two ways. They create a sequence of short, discrete periods of time in a single lesson, building a sense of variation across that sequence, but AS can also create variation within a sequence of lessons too. Let’s face it, much of the time English teachers are asking their students to do pretty much one thing: find/identify/select examples of language and comment on their effects (in verbal or written forms). However you try to package it, it’s the same thing. I offer AS as just one way to shake up this basic theme, but one way which can be imaginatively adapted in lots of other ways, and can produce some fine examples of active learning.
At root, this is what I mean by an annotation station: a place in the classroom where students go to make annotations (of one sort or another). In a lesson of this sort, I put a big online timer on the whiteboard so that students know how much time they’ve got left at each station. A buzzer goes, and it’s on to the next station. Hardly revolutionary, right? But managed well, this strategy can be a great way of inducing greater levels of active participation.
The Benefits
greater energy and galvanisation across all students simply as a result of being literally ‘active’
less passive engagement because of the time restrictions, and because each station feels like a new challenge which only requires attention for a short period of time
a feeling of competition among groups and within individuals
an accumulation of work which amounts to quite a lot over a lesson, but which doesn’t feel like a lot to the students at any one time because everything is bitesize
Sometimes I use this strategy quite simply to bring some energy to the standard practice of annotating, in which students, independently or in pairs, locate examples/quotes in a specified extract of text currently being studied, highlight, and provide explanations of language effects in the form of annotations. When recently looking at the steamboat chase scene in The Sign of Four, for instance, I photocopied the relevant passage large on eight A3 sheets, created eight stations around the room, and got students to repeatedly circulate, annotating new quotes and adding to others comments at each. They alternated between silent rounds and talking rounds so that they had moments when they could reflect on their own ideas interspersed with moments when they could discuss thoughts with others in their groups.
But my favourite examples are those which require more careful planning and delivery, aiming to maximise on different approaches at each station to sustain or reboot students’ interest and attention.
A Specific Example
Take a lesson I designed for a bottom-set year 11 class on Macbeth—a particularly lethargic bottom set, largely dominated by boys. I wanted them to have plenty to say on Lady Macbeth’s famous ‘unsex me’ soliloquy (it’s a key scene, after all). So, I created stations that had different tasks, each focusing on a single /word/phrase from the soliloquy, and created the same number of groups (with students arranged in these groups as carefully as I would for a seating plan).
At base, each station required the students to identify, discuss and annotate: a) a technique; b) it’s effect. The technique bit was simple. I could rely on a certain level of existing knowledge, but I left prompting questions at each station, and posted up all the terms around the room so students could spot the one they needed, if this help was needed. (The process of having to discover the right answer somewhere the room certainly worked for some, who might otherwise have given up quickly or zoned out.)
For part b—the effects—there was a greater degree of variation which required students to acquire the information/generate interpretations in different ways. At one station, for instance, students had to complete a cloze exercise to help them ponder why Lady Macbeth might want to be unsexed. At another, they had to rearrange draw connections between a raven and other ‘night creatures’ to help them ponder why Lady Macbeth mentions this bird. The final step before students left each station was to ensure they had written down their ‘answer’ (annotation) in their copies of Macbeth.
By the time the students had finished the full round of stations, they had considered the full suite of quotes/techniques I wanted them to address in this soliloquy and got those all-important annotations written down. There was time assigned after the AS part to enable them to discuss and catch up on these annotations. Would all the students in the class have done this much work if I’d got them to do this in a more traditional annotation exercise? Most unlikely. Were they involved at each stage in a way that kept their attention and reduced the instances of ‘zone out’? Most definitely.
So there you have it, a great strategy for Active Learning! Why not check out more related posts from our Engagement category...
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