Active Learning: Aims and Implications
The Writing Program's Faculty Resource pages aim to:
- Outline a pedagogy that coheres the various methods commonly used in Dartmouth's writing classrooms;
- Offer strategies to make these methods even more effective;
- Introduce our methods and philosophies to instructors who are new to the program.
Dartmouth's writing instructors employ an array of effective instructional methods as they teach writing. Many of these methods are drawn from the pedagogy known as Active Learning (sometimes referred to as "engaged learning," or "student-centered learning"). Active Learning pedagogy seeks to overhaul the model of education in which students impassively receive knowledge from their instructors. In Active Learning classrooms, students are challenged to forego passivity in favor of contribution and participation. Responsibility for learning changes hands as instructors and students collaborate to teach and learn from one another
Active Learning classrooms are distinguished by three principles:
- Active Learning is student-driven. In the Active Learning classroom, students might be asked to lead discussion, to design their own writing assignments, to instruct their peers, and to collaborate with their instructor to determine course aims and assess course work.
- Active Learning teaches students how to learn in collaboration with their peers, creating a community that facilitates learning. This community, properly designed, helps students to understand the expectations and conventions of the community of scholars that they are about to join.
- Active Learning asks instructors to transfer to students some portion of the authority that has traditionally been theirs. Students, in turn, take increased responsibility for their writing educations. Transferring authority requires instructors to shift their focus from setting standards to diagnosing problems, from giving direction to facilitating learning, from focusing exclusively on product to supporting process. In the Active Learning classroom, instructors, like students, remain actively engaged.