Inside Mr. Wieman’s Classroom: Creating An Active Learning Environment

Every teacher has that student. The student who is physically present in the classroom but is mentally absent. The student who spends the whole period with their head down. The student who never turns anything in. The student who tries to talk the whole time. You can be an expert in classroom management, but still struggle with engaging all of your students. When a teacher worries about engaging everyone, the typical response they always get is “you can’t reach every student.” But shouldn’t we stop for a moment and think rationally how likely is it that these prophecies of doom are right in their prediction? I’m often reminded of a modern day allegory by Loren Eisley when a fellow educator voices this dilemma.

One day a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean. Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?” The youth replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”

“Son,” the man said, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!” After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said…..“I made a difference for that one”.

“Even if you can’t reach every one of your students, you can always try. And when you do touch someone, it will have made a difference to them”.

So, how do you try? By creating an Active Learning environment of course! In an Active learning environment learners participate, collaborate with other, and apply concepts to the real world. It requires hard mental effort but leads to better retention and an understanding of the material that can be transferred to other situations.

“Learning is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners”.

To understand why active learning works so well, it helps to know that when our brain decides what to remember, it asks itself two fundamental questions:

Can I understand?
And do I need to know?

When you ask “Can I understand?” your brain always puts new information on the foundation of existing knowledge. If the foundation is missing the brain has no idea what to do with it. And as a result, it will throw it away.

In other words, our brain needs to build foundational neuron connections for new information to attach to – which is both why active learning is more mental work, but also essential for learning.

When we ask ourselves: “Do I need to know?” our brain separates between the material it finds worth to remember and the one it can forget. If it’s unlikely that new information will ever be used again,the brain is smart enough to throw it away. If our brain thinks that the information is needed again, say it could increase our social, occupational, or intellectual status, the brain will store it in long-term memory. To stay there and be easily recalled, you just have to periodically use or think of it.

Have you ever learned or taught in an active learning environment? And if so, how does it compare to learning the conventional way? To understand how active learning is applied in classrooms, let’s look at the teachings of Prof. Carl Wieman, a Nobel prize-winning physicist and a leading proponent of the method. There are four steps to it.

STEP 1:
Prior to class, the students read up on the fundamentals of the lesson, so they get an idea of the terms and basic phenomena. In class, Professor Wieman starts with a brief introduction and then gives questions to solve. He will have students use clickers, a little device on which students can answer multiple-choice questions. This feature is readily available on various online teaching platforms as well. In a more traditional setting, handheld placards can also be used. Alternatively or for complex problems, worksheets could also be handed out.

STEP 2:
Wieman projects a problem and asks all students to select one of three possible answers using their clicker or response cards. This has two benefits: First, the teacher gets an idea about how many of his students already understand the topic, and second, the students are now focused on the question. They want to know if they were right! It is important though that the question is both challenging and interesting.
All this takes around less than 5 minutes.

STEP 3
Without telling the students how they voted and following Eric Mazur’s Peer Instruction Method — which involves questions, peer discussions, votes and group discussions — the students then discuss the question and their answers with one or two classmates, ideally with someone who disagrees with their own opinion. This can also be done in breakout rooms during an online class.

During the discussion, the students have to come up with a reason for their answer and why the others may be wrong. Meanwhile, the instructor is circulating around, listening in to gauge student thinking, and answering brief questions.

Then there will be a second vote. And only now the results will be shown.
Typically the second vote will be much better than the first as students learn a great deal from their discussions. An ideal question will have about ⅓ correct on the first vote and 85% correct on the second. All this takes around 7 minutes.

STEP 4:
Now the professor leads a follow-up discussion with all the students to provide feedback, exploring the different reasoning, which one is correct, and importantly, which is incorrect and why? Only at the very end, professor Wieman will explain the correct solution and answer follow-up questions. Ascertain the students’ understanding from the questions they ask, he decides if it is time to move on. All of which takes around 10 minutes.

There are three reasons why active learning works so well.

● First, the students are actively working on interesting problems. And as they all voted for an answer right at the beginning, they have a stake in the outcome. That means their brains decide that the information covered is important to be remembered and are hence more receptive for learning.

● Second, rather than solving problems alone, in groups they dive deep into the material. Explaining to a peer engages novel mental processes. As a result they construct new synaptic pathways inside their brains.

● Third, the explanation from the teacher comes only once the students have already formed their own thoughts about the concept. At this point, the explanation makes more sense as the brain can connect the new information to all the thoughts it had just built. The correct answers have a solid foundation.

A large body of research has shown big differences in the outcomes between passive and active learning.In one carefully executed experiment, physics instructors taught their course in two ways: some classes were taught in a conventional style and others using active learning. Even though the teachers were the same and the students were similar, on average the active learners doubled their understanding when they were tested at the end of the course.

Other experiments have shown that long term retention is higher as well. Students that take a conventional lecture that is followed by a test, forget around 90% of the material within 6 months. In an active learning environment students can retain more than 70% of what they have learned two years later.

Sometimes teachers show a problem and then demonstrate the class how to solve it.
They believe that they can just transfer their own thinking into the student’s head through an explanation. Unfortunately, for new ideas, the brain doesn’t work that way. Unless the brain actively constructs those ideas within, it is as if the material was never heard. Learning, after all, is not the product of teaching. Learning is the product of the activity of learners.