Slouching toward Active Learning: Using E-tools to enhance IGL

Rich Slatta, Professor of History

Computer technologies can help us promote active learning and inquiry-guided learning. Here are a few examples.

Do the following:

1. Embrace Student Centeredness: Easier for You; Better for Them!
2. Model being a learner; bring your research into the classroom; involve students, if possible; acknowledge openly and proudly when they teach you something; model inquiry not omniscience.
3. Keep it interactive-- student-to-student; student-to-instructor
4. Promote Active Learning
5. Be incremental-- "Rome wasn't built in a day" I taught my first class, as a graduate student, in 1972. I'm still learning, changing, exploring-you don't have to create the entire course of tomorrow today.

Avoid the following:

1. "Shovelware," read my lecture notes. Message: I'm too lazy to read them to you.
2. Babbling head, aka sage on the e-stage. Message: I'd rather be doing standup--or Broadway.
3. Data dump/ Web Assign hell, aka nobody home here, aka the MacDonald's model. Message: You're on your own.
4. Training seals, aka plug and chug, aka drill and kill, aka repita por favor. Message: Bloom got it wrong. Memorizing is everything.

Sample Approaches

1. Help students inquire-- and get their hands dirty by using Primary Sources What are the primary sources/raw materials of your discipline?
2. Construct Online Essays for Active Learning Use to supplement primary sources; not substitute for them.
3. Critical Evaluation of Web Sites
4. Help For Visual Learners: Concept Mapping
A picture may be worth. . .
• Brainstorming
• Causes of Latin American independence
• Synthesis Matrix Integrating and organization multi-source information
• Venn Diagram of Writing
• Destruction of Primary Sources
• Use audiovisuals-- add brief sound and video clips online
5. Be clear! Keep pedagogy transparent! Use rubrics or other overt standards of assessment
6. Get feedback! from students (class assessment and self-assessments) from colleagues (peer observations)
anonymous or credited online evaluations
7. Help students become more self-aware learners. Mid-semester self-assessments, in which 1/2 the class responds to the evaluations of the other 1/2.
8. Set priorities: Find your special teaching interests and begin with them
9. Learning styles inventory One size does not fit all learners.
10. Do an Approach Inventory
We ask students to think about what they do; we need to do so too.

Take heart: People have been working at teaching better for a long time.