Week 2: Active learning in practice

Introduction

In Week 1 you examined global and national policies on teaching and the shift to a more participatory pedagogy. The focus this week is on how such participatory pedagogy can be enacted in practice in schools and colleges by teachers and teacher educators.

The week starts by looking at key features of a participatory pedagogy. You will then explore some of the TESS-India OER in detail and begin to identify how these encourage teachers to move to more active approaches to learning in their classrooms. There are six activities for you to complete this week, including Activity 2.6 that is part of your portfolio of participation. The image below is a scene that can be found in many classrooms across the world.

Figure 1

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The teacher is standing at the front of the class, talking about the components of a flower. She is holding a book with the picture of the flower in. A student sitting at the front of the classroom has an understanding of the components of the flower; she is drawn with a thought bubble of a picture of the flower. The student behind her looks confused; she is drawn with a thought bubble that reads ‘?’. There is a student at the back of the classroom who has fallen asleep.

Figure 1

All teachers carry images of and ideas about teachers and the teaching role. Their memories of their own schooling will influence their views of what good teachers do and they will also be swayed by the images of teachers around them in films, books and TV shows. Research from around the world shows the difficulty of changing teachers’ attitudes and assumptions about teaching. In order to change, teachers need to experience different ways of learning, try new approaches and analyse evidence of the effectiveness of new practices.

1 Learning through active participation

The notion of ‘active learning’ challenges the idea that learners will simply absorb knowledge transmitted by the teachers. The experience of active learning may be unfamiliar to many teachers.

Learning through active participation will always involve learners being cognitively active – engaging their minds in their learning. It might also involve an actual physical action (such as making a poster, building a model or doing an experiment), but will always involve cognitive action. Just reading or listening to a lecture is insufficient; understanding is actively constructed by the learner through thinking about the new material, processing information and making connections with previous learning or established ideas.

If you are interested, you can read more about different ideas of learning in Section 5 of Creating open educational resources, an OER course from The Open University: 

• ‘Introduction’
• ‘How do people learn?’
• ‘Behaviorism, Piagetianism and social constructivism’

Activity 2.1: Recognising active participation in learning

Timing: Allow approximately 30 minutes

1. Look at these photographs taken in Indian classrooms. Focus on what the students and teachers are doing.

(a)	(b)	(c)
(d)	(e)	(f)
(g)	(h)	(i)

Figure 2

2. For each photograph list the evidence that the students are actively engaged in their learning. Students will be motivated if the activities are meaningful to them and if they are able to connect them to their own experiences and things that are of value to them.
3. Now listen to Dr Sandhya Paranjpe from TESS-India talk about what she notices in the photographs of Indian classrooms. How do her ideas compare with yours?

1.1 Examples of active participation in learning

The photographs in Activity 2.1 show a variety of teaching strategies to promote active participation: pair work, group work, building models, mind mapping, brainstorming, and role play. The teacher is rarely standing at the front, but is moving around the room, listening, watching and supporting students. Practitioners who promote active engagement in learning:

• give students the opportunity to talk
• listen to students
• encourage students to ask questions
• use a variety of different approaches to learning in their teaching
• link new ideas to students’ experiences and lives.

Above all, they will use what they discover about their students to plan appropriate future activities.

2 TESS-India Key Resources

The TESS-India Key Resources detail approaches that enable teachers to take a more student-centred, participatory approach to teaching and learning. These approaches are central to TESS-India’s Teacher Development OER. The Key Resources are as follows:

Maximise

Figure 3

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An image of a blackboard with a list of the TESS-India key resources written on it. These are:

• Planning lessons
• Involving all
• Talk for learning
• Using pair work
• Using questioning to promote thinking
• Monitoring and giving feedback
• Using groupwork
• Assessing progress and performance
• Using local resources
• Storytelling, songs, role play and drama.

Figure 3

These Key Resources apply to all subjects and levels, and offer practical guidance on the approaches advocated by Indian educational policy.

3 TESS-India Teacher Development OER

The TESS-India Teacher Development OER take the ideas or principles of the TESS-India Key Resources and videos and model them in the context of the school curriculum.

As you saw in Week 1, there are TESS-India OER for Elementary English, Maths, Science and Language & Literacy, and Secondary English, Maths and Science. (Titles of the OER can be viewed under Learning resources on the TESS-India website.)

In Activity 2.3 you explore in detail some of the TESS-India OER and begin to identify how they encourage teachers to move to more active approaches to learning in their classrooms.

3.1 Key messages from the TESS-India Teacher Development OER

• The OER positions the teachers’ classroom as the site of learning and teachers as agents in learning.
• By participating in the activities, rather than just reading about them, teachers experience and come to understand the participatory pedagogy as they enact it in practice. It is intended that teachers will then be able to use the ideas in the OERs to teach any topic in the curriculum.
• The OER focus on pedagogy, but as teachers engage with the activities and case studies, the OER will also help to support their subject knowledge development.
• Each OER is written to make a coherent account for the teacher, but individual case studies, activities and resources can be used effectively depending on the context.
• The language is designed to be straightforward and clear.
• The OER can be adapted if necessary – the topics and examples can be changed.
• By engaging with active, participatory pedagogy, teachers are provided with direct evidence from their own classrooms of how this new practice enables student learning. In this way the TESS-India OER takes policy developments into the classroom, motivates and sustains pedagogic innovation, and improves student learning and achievement.
• The OER also encourage teachers to work collaboratively and promote planning lessons in advance. They invite the teachers to reflect on their past experiences and provide opportunities for the teachers to extend their knowledge and understanding.

A copy of these key messages  and a PowerPoint slide titled ‘TESS-India OER: addressing these problems’ are available. You might find these useful for later activities in the MOOC.

4 Promoting learning through active participation

Enacting active learning strategies in the classroom requires teachers to develop specific knowledge and skills. For example, for groupwork to be effective, a teacher needs to think about how to:

• arrange the classroom
• divide the students into groups
• (most importantly) design a task that will help students to learn.

In Activity 2.4 you will be examining the skills that teachers need to use different active learning strategies effectively. 

5 Modelling principles and practices

Shifting from a teacher-centred approach to the pedagogy advocated by the NCFTE (2009) is challenging. Simply telling teachers to adopt active approaches to learning is not effective – they need to experience the approaches for themselves.

Teacher educators play an important role in helping teachers to acquire the knowledge and, more importantly, the skills to use the approaches needed. An effective way to teach teachers about any of the approaches mentioned so far is to model them in your own work with teachers. By modelling the principles and pedagogy underpinning TESS-India, the teachers or student teachers that you are working with can experience the benefits of active learning. Even though you may be working with a large number of teachers or trainees, you can promote active learning by using a variety of different types of questions, giving students thinking time or the opportunity to talk about their ideas in pairs before responding.

When teachers are actively engaged – doing, sharing, discussing, writing, solving problems – you have the opportunity to watch and listen, and intervene and encourage if necessary. You will find out how they are responding to new ideas and ways of teaching, what they are thinking, and what they find difficult or useful. This will give you the opportunity to adapt your approach and be more effective in meeting their needs and context-specific requirements.

The next activity focuses on how active learning can be modelled through working with teachers. The perspective is from someone working with pre-service teachers, but the ideas apply just as well to in-service training. 

6 Reviewing your learning

7 Moving forward

The TESS-India OER position teachers and teacher educators as active learners. They bring together theory and practice to support educators in implementing active participatory approaches to learning. They are underpinned by the belief that students and teachers create meaning through participation. As teachers come to know their students, and value and respect what they bring to the classroom, they will start to innovate. By doing so, students will enjoy their learning and learn more.

In Week 3 you explore how you can use video in your work with teachers.

Now go to Week 3: Using video to support teacher development.

References

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

Specific content from the TESS-India OER, including images from the TESS-India video resources, are made available under this licence unless otherwise stated.

The TESS-India project is led by The Open University, UK and is funded by UK AID from the UK government.