Engaging & Supporting Diverse Learners: Making Learning Active

1. Engaging & Supporting Diverse Learners:Making Learning Active Dr. Bruce Taylor Director, The Center for Adolescent Literacies September 26, 2011

2. Our Agenda for Tonight • Quick question • Active vs. Passive Learning • Teaching & learning tools that make learning active • Questions

3. Quick Question • When teaching in your classroom, do you find yourself wishing you could wake up the students and get them more excited in learning? • Let’s talk about this for a couple minutes. • What can we do about this?

4. Active vs. Passive Learning • "Learning by Doing" or "Active Learning" means engaging all of our senses and attention into discovering something new. • When children listen to teachers lecturing or when they watch TV, we call this "passive learning."

5. Active vs. Passive Learning Passive Learning Active Learning the instructor models activities that students implement in class visual aids, demonstrations, etc., integrated into class presentations Students talk, discuss, present, enact, create • "traditional class": lecturing instructor verbalizing information to passive note-taking students • instructor is "verbal" textbook • student is an "empty" vessel to be filled with knowledge • on exams, students regurgitate what the instructor tells them

7. Putting These Into Practice Let’s try some of these: • ThinkPairShare with word problems (math) • Fishbowl & Ticket to Talk with Civil Rights (social studies) • 3-2-1 and Vocabulary Cards with global warming (science)

8. D B 1 2 A 3 4 C 5 E Looking at the figure above, if triangle ABC is an equilateral triangle and line BC is parallel to line DE, what is the measure of angle 5? A) 60 degrees B) 90 degrees C) 120 degrees D) 180 degrees E) Not enough information is given to answer this question Use ThinkPairShare to solve this problem.

9. Questions???