CHEE Seminar: Paul Blowers
September 20, 2021 – 3:00 PM
“Active Learning Approaches with Purpose”
Paul Blowers, PhD
Distinguished Professor
Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering
University of Arizona
Harshbarger Bldg., Room 206
Social Hour: Harshbarger 118B, 2:30 PM
ABSTRACT
Many educators have heard about active learning approaches but may be intimidated by what that means and how to deploy them because of perceived barriers like the time it takes to create the materials, the time it takes to do the activities and maintaining control of the class. This interactive seminar will start by briefly looking at some literature that shows the impact of active learning on student success and achievement.
Dr. Blowers will then discuss some of the affordances of deploying active learning approaches that surprise many practitioners when they become more comfortable with constructing activities and scaffolding approaches for students to be able to access and master the content in a class. One of the affordances includes formative assessment, which is becoming open to collecting information during class that informs what you need to say. Oftentimes, an activity can be intentionally designed to reveal what students understand and where they are confused so that you can take corrective action immediately. Another affordance is linked with formative assessment but focused on timing. The pacing of a class is easier to modify when deploying activities because you are seeing the work and thinking of students and you can speed up or slow down as needed. One more obvious affordance of using active learning is that students are engaged, alert, and participating while they construct their knowledge of the content.
Some practical tips about tasks become useful when using active learning. The task given to the students should be focused, purpose-driven, have a flow that feels natural, and have a direct deliverable that can be observed. There are both high and low technology ways of these things being done in real or virtual classrooms. The skills to do these things quickly builds when a faculty member deploys a technique and then is open to seeing how the students respond. Examples of high- and low-tech ways of doing these four things will be explored during the seminar. Several types of prompts and the purposes behind them will be shared so that educators can think about how they might apply some of the ideas in their own courses, for students of differing abilities and levels of background.
In order for active learning to be effective in the classroom, the students do need to do some preparatory work that they are held accountable for. This pre-work can take the form of assigned reading with pre-quizzes, setting up a problem and submitting it for completion credit, or watching a recording that shows who accessed it. There are plusses and minuses of each kind of pre-work and those will be discussed.