It’s likely that at this point I do not need to convince most of you that active learning can be highly beneficial to student learning. There is a multitude of resources, including HAPS Educator articles, which discuss successful active learning in a variety of classroom settings. But here’s the thing. With so many great ideas at our finger tips, where are we supposed to begin if we want to implement active learning in our own courses?
GOALS
First, step back from the swarm of ideas swirling in your mind and reflect on your goals. What are the goals of your course (which may or may not be content-related)? Your goals should shape the type of active learning exercise(s) you implement. Here’s what the participants at my workshop at the HAPS Annual Conference in May had to say about their goals with active learning:
PLAN
To ensure your efforts are manageable, start with just one or two sessions. Upon successful implementation of the initial activity, you can build off it, or incorporating additional methods. Allow enough time to develop the activity, implement it in class, and give yourself time afterward to assess and for providing student feedback if necessary. Some (or all) of these steps can take a lot of time!
BUY-IN
This can be tough. Students will sometimes resist the unfamiliar (i.e. not a standard lecture). Be transparent. Explain the goals of the activity, and if appropriate, share evidence to support the activity. Ensure students that it is of the appropriate difficulty level for them and that you’re there to guide them. Considering giving credit for participation, especially if it’s a regular part of class. For more on this topic, check out the Cavannagh, et al. (2016) article or this blog post from Bryn Lutes at Washington University.
RESOURCES
Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers by Angelo and Cross is a book that will walk you through identifying your goals, selecting appropriate activities for those goals, and it gives you a detailed guide for implementation of the activities and assessment. Assessment is a critical part of scholarly teaching! How else will you know if the original goals were accomplished?
Technology. A simple, yet effective means of incorporating small snippets of active learning into a lecture can be interactive questions. Similar to “clicker” questions, there are many web-based platforms which enable faculty to easily incorporate interactive questions (multiple formats) into lectures. It’s an opportunity to give the students practice retrieving informing, as well as allowing instructors to see where students are in their understanding of the material.
Low-tech options. In lieu of all of the apps and high-tech options out there we sometimes forget that a marker board, or pen and paper can be effective tools. Drawing or writing out a process in a way that is meaningful to students (and maybe incorporating a drawing) is an effective means to promote learning. Get creative with other materials too! Pull ‘n’ Peel Twizzlers make a great model of vascular supply, and playdoh, pipe cleaners, paper, etc. can be used to model many different body parts.
While this is by no means an exhaustive list of resources available for us to use in teaching, I hope it helps you get started. Establish your goals. Pick an activity to meet those goals. Plan well, and don’t forget to include assessment! Happy teaching!
Cavanagh, A.J., Aragón, O.R., Chen, X., Couch, B.A., Durham, M.F., Bobrownicki, A., Hanauer, D.I., & Graham, M.J. (2016). Student buy-in to active learning in a college science course. CBE Life Sci Educ 15(4).
Michael, J. (2006). Where’s the evidence that active learning works? Adv Physiol Educ 30: 159-167.
Pierce, R., J. Fox. (2012). Vodcasts and active-learning exercises in a “flipped classroom” model of a renal pharmacotherapy module. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education 76(10): 1-5.
Audra Schaefer is an Assistant Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology who teaches neuroanatomy and histology to first year medical students. She oversee multiple systems-based integrated courses that are part of the first two years in the medical curriculum. She also conducts educational research, with interests in metacognition, study skills and remediation.
Historically, my labs followed a 2 week period of appendicular and then axial bones, followed by a 2 week period of appendicular and then axial muscles. My students scraped an average of around 67% on their weekly practical quizzes. They always did slightly better with their bones, and then much worse with their muscles in part due to that muscle attachment component. I wanted more, so I flipped to appendicular bones one week, followed by appendicular muscles the next week. Their averages went up to 78% for the unit, but I still got a little of the whining related to bone landmarks. Their scores were higher on bone weeks and lower on muscle weeks, so I switched to regional study of the body, bones and muscles of the leg one week, the arm the next and so forth. For the last three years, my averages for this unit have settled around 75%, but the students are making the connections between bone landmarks and their muscle attachments.
I remember when I took A&P, my lab instructor handed me a Rubbermaid with the bones for that week and said, “Get to it!” I had the “luxury” of having previously taken Comparative Anatomy class, so 5 of my peers worked with me to learn the material. Most of my peers left lab and were overwhelmed. So when I started teaching A&P, I tried to help the students whose strategies mimicked my classmates’, but I kept running into an almost total mental shut down the moment I handed out their term list for the week. So I made a second change. Now my labs have 6 stations and students spend about 15-20 minutes at each station. Each station has an objective, which also helps the students chunk up the material into manageable pieces.
Just what can you do at these stations? One is the dissection/prosection table with the cadaver or cat. One is a pile of bones and they have to put Humpty Dumpty back together again – recognizing left vs right and what the bone names are. Another station has a plastic skeleton with felt muscles and scotch tape to study origin, insertion, action. I have brought in Halloween skeleton decorations and asked the students to look for anatomical inconsistencies. Another table has a few bones with the goal of identifying the landmarks from their list of terms.
