How to: Use COVID-19 to shift to Active Learning.

Maybe Active Learning hasn’t been your thing for several reasons. But the COVID-19 pandemic is a good reason to make the shift. In the past you’ve probably been using “lecture” as your main teaching approach. And there’s nothing wrong with that. In the correct situation, with the correct content, lecturing can be a very powerful teaching strategy.

But during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic, or in other situations that distance learning is required, lecturing has its limitations. You can lecture as much as you want. But in most cases, you don’t have any idea if the students are listening or not. You can’t see there faces and how they react. Did they get what you were telling? Are they struggling?  This is all very hard to recognize.

At that moment active learning comes to the rescue. You shift the learning from listening to actively working with learning materials. You are no longer counting on the reactions you see while lecturing. But you are now more focussed on the results students are producing during the learning process. WhatsApp, MS Teams or other tools become backchannels through which you will communicate individually with your pupils in order to help them with questions. Your teaching becomes more differentiated. And your role as a teacher is more focussed towards coaching your problem. You are no longer between them and the knowledge and skills you need to teach them. But you are there guide that facilitates their learning.

Of course, making these changes requires an effort of teachers. Don’t try to change everything in 1 time. Because don’t forget, lecturing still has its strengths. Start with 1 lesson in which you don’t lecture the subject, but for instance create a WebQuest in which the students have to find the answers to well formulated questions using sources you provide. It’s not just searching on the internet. It’s finding the right answers in resources you provide. And check how it worked. What were the good things? What went wrong and can be done better in a next WebQuest? Or maybe use Flipped Classroom clips to instruct pupils. There are several ways to make your lessons more active. And certainly, get your students involved in your evaluation process. How did they feel using active learning? What would help them to learn even better?

Often switching to Active Learning is perceived as the teacher giving away control. But it isn’t. It is giving the students the ownership of their learning. And an involved student, is a student who gets better results.