The colours of active learning

I've been challenged by Simon Lancaster @S_J_Lancaster to write a blog post about this image as part of the #blimage trend started by Steve Wheeler ‏@timbuckteeth . This explains the #blimage challenge - have a go!

Photo: Simon Lancaster

 

The first thing I noticed about the image was how colourful it is, and it occurred to me that this is just like many aspects of learning and teaching, but is particularly relevant to active learning. Interestingly we tend to talk about active learning in very black and white terms – either a lecture has a passive transmissionist style with the lecturer doing the majority of the talking, or the session involves active learning, in which students get to think about and discuss problems amongst themselves. It is an either-or situation. We very rarely think about the variation that can be involved in active learning, and how that might affect the outcomes.

My current research project involves doing a detailed anlaysis of the interactions that take place between students and teachers during introductory physics lectures at the University of Edinburgh. The lectures use a combination of a flipped approach, where students are asked to read from a text-book before the lectures and Peer-Instruction to introduce active learning, during the lectures.  They are taught by an experienced lecturer who has used active learning strategies for a number of years. Both of these pedagogies are popular and increasingly common, particularly in science. They provide a way to create 'interactive engagement' in large lecture theatre classes and it is easy to find instructions on the web for how to implement both of these.

But one of the really interesting things I have found is has found just how varied active learning can be and that there isn't just one single correct way to use these techniques. In my analysis the lecturer uses at least 10 different variations on Peer-Instruction over the course of a semester - a varied mix of approaches just like the multi-coloured image above.

But while the image above is multi-coloured, it does not use every available colour randomly. Instead hues and tones have been chosen that work together, that are appropriate for the image and for what it is trying to convey. 

So too, the variations on Peer-Instruction that I observed are not picked at random – each one is chosen for a particular reason, either as the best way to help students learn a particular concept,  or as a response to the needs of the students at that particular time on that particular day.  Ross Galloway, the lecturer on the course and member of the Physics Education Research group at the University of Edinburgh describes this as like having a tool-kit, with multiple options to draw on. Yet active learning is often treated as something that can be achieved by simply following a recipe.  Just as an experienced artist will know how colour and patterns work well together, a teacher needs to know how and why a particular approach will work in a given situation.


I hope to write more about the theoretical ideas from the literature that can help teachers to understand the 'why' rather than just the 'how' of active learning.  These ideas form the basis of a workshop I'm presenting at a conference – so if you are coming to Vice-Phec (Physics and Chemistry HE education conference) and want to think about this in more detail, join me there!  

The colours of active learning by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.