Why Is Active Learning—Known to Confer Deeper Understanding—Still Such a Hard Sell?
From Elizabeth Murray
The July 15th issue of Nature magazine contained an interesting article, “Why We Are Teaching Science Wrong and How to Make It Right”. As Project Manager of MIT BLOSSOMS, this article was of special interest to me since BLOSSOMS has striven for the past seven years to create STEM lessons that show teachers how to encourage active student learning rather than follow a traditional, passive lecture format. According to the Nature article, “evidence has been accumulating for decades that students who actively engage with course material will end up retaining it for much longer than they would have otherwise, and they will be better able to apply their knowledge broadly”. Given this increasing evidence, along with the strong support of active learning proponents like Nobel Prize winner, Physicist Carl Wieman, why is there still such resistance on the part of teachers to use this pedagogy?

While this Nature article focuses in on undergraduate STEM education, much of what it discusses applies equally to high schools. Certainly we at MIT BLOSSOMS have uncovered deep skepticism towards active learning at teacher training workshops we’ve run in the U.S. and also in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and China. The response of high school teachers in all countries is usually the same. They appreciate learning about this new, student-centered pedagogy and agree that it is a better way to encourage a deeper understanding of science. Despite their enthusiasm, however, most teachers can’t see themselves teaching this way!

Looking closely at the high school teachers we’ve encountered over the past seven years, we can identify six reasons why teachers feel intense skepticism and actual resistance to active learning:

1. Almost all teachers today learned through lectures themselves and many still believe that this is the only way to learn… as do some of their students and many parents of those students.
2. Around the world, most teachers are evaluated and compensated for teaching-to the-test. Any deviation from this can threaten their livelihood.
3. Active learning requires considerably more time for preparation than do standard lectures. Given the packed schedules of most high school teachers, such additional preparation time is simply not available.
4. Many teachers feel much more comfortable with a scripted lecture where they are in control of what happens in the classroom. With active learning, all sorts of questions and problems can arise. Many high school teachers don’t feel comfortable with this!
5. Active learning—with its open-discussion format—is especially difficult for teachers with limited content expertise.
6. Even if teachers want to try active learning, they are working within a school system—including administrators and parents—that is not conducive or welcoming to this type of educational innovation and reform.

Supporters of active learning agree that real change will only come when reforms are made throughout the educational system. Educational leaders and administrators need to recognize and embrace this need for systemic change, as do parents. Curriculums should be redesigned to include more time for active, experiential and deep learning. The whole idea of assessment must be re-imagined—for example, including the use of student portfolios to augment (if not replace) student scores on standardized tests. And most critical to this changed system will be sizably increased investments in the initial and ongoing training of exceptionally competent STEM teachers: Teachers who can deliver rigorous content to their students; Teachers confident enough to engage in math and science inquiry in their classrooms; Teachers unleashed from a system that wastes their time on extraneous tasks, severely limiting their ability to ignite a STEM learning flame in students.

Quoting from Nature:

“Researchers often feel that a teacher's job is simply to communicate content: the factual knowledge covered in the course. That is a big stumbling block for active learning, because time spent on team discussions and the like can seem like time taken away from that content. Getting past that requires compromise, says Jeff Leips, a geneticist who teaches ecology and evolution at the UMBC. “You have to accept that you can't cover everything to the same level.” But the pay-off is that the students retain much more of the material that is covered, and are able to use that knowledge much more effectively.”

Elizabeth Murray is Project Manager of the MIT BLOSSOMS Initiative.

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