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Thriving in Academe
Issues To Consider

Risking an Active Classroom

You can help first-year students become active learners.

How can I cover the material if I give up lecturing and devote class time to more involving activities?
Our compulsion to “cover” material usually is counterproductive, but it is especially destructive in courses with first-year students. Lecturing without pause tends to reinforce the passive listening, verbatim note-taking, and superficial information processing strategies that many students bring to college. Students need to learn course content, to be sure, but first-year students also need to be weaned from their conviction that material cannot be important if it was not covered in class—and we need to give up our apparent belief that students cannot learn it unless we say it. If we can encourage students to develop strategies to deal effectively with out of class assignments, they will be able to get more from reading and perhaps even process information faster during lectures.

My students say they just can’t understand the reading and they want me to go over it in class. Should I do it? Most first-year students are used to learning content from the “oral texts” of classroom presentation and handouts provided by teachers. They often see our reading assignments as supplemental or tangential, a source to skim perhaps, but nothing more. Although there is a tendency to want to rescue students who appear to be foundering, it is probably better to re-emphasize the importance of being able to learn from reading. A better strategy might be to use some structured reading assignments (for example, asking students to draw a conclusion from a reading assignment and to provide three quotations from the text in support of their opinion) to initiate class discussion. This way, students will be active participants in seeking to decipher the reading rather than merely the passive recipients of our decoding.

Creating a more active classroom and supporting active study practices seem like good ideas, but how can I do it in a course with a large enrollment? Large classes are a particular challenge in first-year instruction. They encourage us to imagine lecturing as the only thing we can do, and they haunt us with visions of hundreds of pages of student work to be processed and recorded. Large classes do have their own dynamics, but for the most part they can be much more active and supportive of students than we imagine. The key is to develop a strategy to sample student work, whether an in-class discussion activity or a micro-theme based on the main ideas in the assigned reading. By sampling some students’ work for one class and other students’ work for the next, we can engage students and give them sufficient feedback even though we cannot read or record every submission.

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