3 Ways to Make Learning Active

Thornton Wilder, an American playwright best known for Our Town, was dissatisfied with the theater of his time. Wilder believed it had become too self-centered. It was almost as if theaters didn’t care if the audience showed up to watch the play at all; they were satisfied performing anyway.

“I felt that something had gone wrong. . . . I began to feel that the theater was not only inadequate, it was evasive.”

— Thornton Wilder

So Wilder wrote Our Town, a play that smashes the fourth wall. Thus, it embraces and capitalizes on the relationship between audience and actor. Wilder wanted the audience to become essential for the performance of the play. He wanted their involvement.

Education in our day may have taken a turn similar to Wilder’s age of audience-unaware theater. It seems that some teachers would go on teaching whether students showed up or not.

Teachers should craft content in such a way that students are expected to contribute as they learn. Good teaching should require that students show up too. It isn’t teaching unless students supply their will, intellect, and imagination to make the content come alive.

Learning, in other words, should be active. So how can we engage our learners to ensure that they take an active role in learning?

1. Engage their will by building new habits

Ensure your learners don’t stop learning when your course is over by giving them new habits. For instance, when I taught literature and writing, I had my students carry pocket notebooks for the entire year.

They were required to show up to each class with observations they’d made the previous week. Maybe they recorded an overheard conversation or an interesting quote. Maybe they recorded some of their own ideas. I didn’t expect them to come up with anything profound that year (though sometimes they did). I simply wanted them to build the habits of observation and note-taking. They actually payed attention.

Ask yourself . . .

What habits can carry my learners into expertise and beyond?

What’s the simplest way for them to start building those habits now?

Maybe you’re teaching a beginner’s music course, so you have your learners upload a video of their weekly practice sessions. Or, if you’re teaching a writing course, you might have your learners upload their weekly writing schedule to make sure they’re writing daily.

2. Engage their intellect by connecting ideas

Help your learners build the scaffolding to hold many new ideas by engaging their intellect. When engaging the intellect, you’re asking students not to build a habit. You’re calling them to connect ideas.

Ask yourself . . .

How can learners connect what I’m teaching them now with what I’ve already taught?

How can learners connect what I’ve taught them with their own experience?

Maybe you’ve taught them about the invention of the printing press, so you ask them how it disrupted the political powers of the time. Or you might ask how the invention of social media is like and unlike the invention of the printing press.

Papers or group discussion might connect these ideas. Or you might have them track the spread of a specific news story for a week on Twitter, noting how people interact with the information, how quickly it spreads, and how long it stays in circulation. If your learners can see how information spreads today, they’ll more easily understand how it spread in the past.

3. Engage their imagination through stories

Draw your learners in deeper with stories. Make what you teach more meaningful and memorable by engaging their imagination.

What if every interaction within your lesson was as good as the most interesting dinner conversation you’ve ever had? Those conversations probably don’t focus on facts and figures (though those things are essential). I bet they focus on real life.

Facts and figures aren’t the story themselves, but they do act as props. They populate a larger world in which a learner can immerse themselves. To engage your learners, you’ll want to keep facts and figures involved while finding stories they belong in.

Ask yourself . . .

What stories can I tell that will connect what I’m teaching with my learners’ broader world?

Take every chance to tell your learners stories. Invite them to share their stories with you as often as you can too. Maybe you’ve been covering the Pythagorean theorem, so you share that a religious cult eventually formed around Pythagoras’s ideas. Or that Pythagoras was fascinated by the relationship of music to mathematics.

Neither of these things explain the Pythagorean theorem. But they do the important job of showing the real-world connections between big ideas and the people who spread them. Your stories can make the ideas you teach meaningful and memorable forever.

Engaging learners creates insatiable learning

Turning passive learning into active might mean the difference between passive consumers and lifelong learners. By engaging your learners actively in your course, you’re helping them snowball their way into greater expertise.

For each course you make, take a moment to consider how you might make it more active. You don’t have to use every one of these ideas in every course you build. But adding one or two of them to each lesson will ensure a better course for you and the ones you teach.

Thousands of teachers use Pathwright every day to design and teach courses to their team, class, or anyone in the world. If you’d like to design a course, we invite you to try out Pathwright for free. You’ve got nothing to lose!