Active learning Active learning is an approach where learners participate in the learning process by building knowledge and understanding. In schools they will usually do this in response to learning opportunities designed by their teacher. What does active learning mean? For learners to make sense of new information and ideas, they need to make links with existing knowledge, so that they can process and then understand new material. This sense-making is an active process which can take place during a wide range of learning activities. It can be contrasted with a passive approach to learning in which the teacher primarily talks ‘at’ students and simply assumes they will make sense of what is said without needing to check. Active learning requires students to think hard and to practise using new knowledge and skills in order to develop long-term recall and a deeper understanding. This deeper understanding will also enable learners to connect different ideas together and to think creatively, once the initial knowledge base is secure.
What is the theory behind active learning? • Active learning is based on a theory of learning called constructivism, which emphasises the fact that learners construct or build their understanding. Jean Piaget (1896–1980), a psychologist and founder of constructivism, researched the cognitive development of children, observing that their knowledge was individually built up, bit by bit. In the process of making meaning, children replace or adapt their existing knowledge and understanding with deeper levels of understanding. • Learning happens as knowledge moves from short- to long-term memory and is incorporated into progressively more detailed and sophisticated mental models called schemas or schemata. Schemata can be thought of as categories we use to classify incoming information (Wadsworth, 1996, p.16). • The theory of social constructivism says that learning happens primarily through social interaction with others, such as a teacher or a learner’s peers. One prominent social constructivist, Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934), described the zone of proximal development (ZPD). This is the area where learning activities should be focused, lying between what the learner can achieve independently and what the learner can achieve with expert guidance.
• Scaffolding describes the support a student or group of students receive as they work towards a learning goal. The idea of scaffolding was developed by cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915–2016) researching oral language acquisition in children. Grounded in social constructivism, the process of scaffolding ‘enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts’ (Wood, Bruner & Ross, 1976, p.90). Scaffolding learning is important to secure new knowledge and/or skills but equally, support should be withdrawn over time and when appropriate, to allow students to develop independence. • The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson, Krathwohl et al, 2001 ) offers a classification of the types of knowledge and cognitive processes students use in order to learn. Active learning approaches will help students develop at every stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy; it will enable learners to engage with the more complex cognitive processes such as evaluate and create, and build a knowledge base that begins with, but is not limited to, factual knowledge. For example, to develop metacognitive knowledge students need to be actively involved with, and aware of, their own learning.