Active Learning: Manipulation of Information

October 27, 2020 / Oskar Cymerman

Active Learning by Manipulation of Information

In the previous post I proposed the ultimate goal of any lesson should be to create activities that promote understanding and increase memory of the topics studied. Then I showed how we can create effective, interactive, digital lessons.

Active learning, or processing of concepts and practice of problem-solving and other skills when they are being introduced (as opposed to after they are taught), increases understanding and recall because students are compelled to think at a higher level.

In this post, I share how to create digital activities that allow students to learn actively and think more deeply by manipulating educational content.

More Active Learning, More Processing

While some teachers make lectures interesting and make room for audience interaction, the main objective of lectures is to provide learners with information. This limits how much each student is allowed to interact with the teacher, other peers, and the material itself. Even when the teacher asks questions during the lecture most students end up listening to someone else processing out loud.

Creating classroom activities that allow students to process the content presented is important for recall and comprehension. But it’s difficult to incorporate more than one follow up activity into lessons that start out with a lecture. There’s simply too little time. Answering questions related to the lecture is not enough. It’s too passive. We must look for ways to give our learners the opportunity to learn more actively.

Getting Started With More Active Learning

A few years ago, I replaced all my lectures with lessons that start with an introductory activity (brief direct instruction or an instructional video or a choice between the two) followed by two to three short application activities. I decreased the amount of content and focused on giving students several ways of processing one to two main concepts during class.

Doing so rejuvenated my teaching. Being able to dive deeper into one concept and not worrying about time relieved the stress. Frequent daily interaction with individual students and small groups as I walked around and helped them learn was fun. The power dynamic changed. It was no longer me telling them what to learn.

Rather, I set a learning path for students to follow each day, showed them the starting point, and provided them with multiple resources to reach comprehension. I was still the number one resource, especially for some students, but now many students could choose whether they needed my help or not, and in many cases they did very well without me once I gave them a few initial instructions.

Many students can become self-directed quickly when given the opportunity. This can set them on an educational path of not only “owning their learning,” but figuring out how to learn efficiently as well.

Any teacher can try this. Take just one lecture and replace it with perhaps 10 minutes of instruction followed by 3 short application activities. Once you become comfortable with this format, create a lesson in which you just explain where students need to go to get the information and set them loose on 3 or 4 activities.

Students do not need to know everything about the topic upfront. They can discover and learn to apply at the same time. This is how the homo sapiens have done it for millennia before and after we started writing on cave walls and stone tablets. This is how students do it outside of school when pursuing their passions. Trial and error. Failure and learning from failure. They apply what they are learning almost immediately. Why not leverage this naturally-evolved best practice every day in schools?

Active Learning in the Whole-Class and Small-Group Formats

There are of course students who like lecture and drill and kill learning, but while those activities tend to be passive, these students find a way to learn actively and understand more profoundly when they ask questions, answer teacher questions, and readily participate in small group or whole class discussions.

Unfortunately, many learners, for various reasons, shy away from such participation even when placed in small groups as these tend to be dominated by one or two pupils. So while we need to continue with collaborative work that promotes content comprehension, skill-building, and social-emotional learning, teachers must also look to create classroom activities that enable all students to participate fully and equally. These types of activities allow students to manipulate educational content.

Digital Manipulation of Information

Manipulation of content in thoughtful ways promotes higher level of processing. In such activities, teachers take a step back, provide support, and challenge students to problem-solve as they interact with the content, draw their own conclusions, and ultimately learn.

Discussion protocols such as Think-Pair-and-Share, drawing pictures, diagrams, and concept maps, building models, summarizing notes, philosophical chairs, or fishbowl activities are all great classroom activities but are not always practical in the digital format necessitated by distance- or hybrid-learning. For example, while drawings and written activities can be digitized, Think-Pair-and-Share is hard to do even in synchronous settings.

But while only some traditional activities work online, the digital format affords many ways of creating interactive and engaging activities. The rest of this article’s focus is on these. Below are three examples I use with descriptions and download links you can use to copy and modify to fit your needs.

Google It! Active Learning Activity

At first glance, the Google It! activity may look basic - Google the stuff and fill out the table with information. How is that different from filling out a packet? Let’s take a closer look.

First, students are not watching the teacher present on Elements, Compounds, and Mixtures. They are not copying from their notes or textbooks into the table. They are asked to go online and find the information for themselves. This is akin to a caveman interacting with his world and learning concepts and skills that allow him to not just survive but to control his environment.

Our students are far from being cave people but they will need transferrable skills they can apply in life and on the job. When “Googling It!,” they are learning to find and curate information. They might encounter some wrong or biased information, but that just adds to not diminishes the learning experience. I believe that it is increasingly our job as teachers to not just teach content but to help our students navigate the world of today and learn skills they can use to better influence their personal and professional outcomes.

Second, the very process of looking and curating online information aids memory because student brains are exposed to the information many times and in many ways. They read and process the information to understand it. They paraphrase it in their own words. They are asked to find and manipulate visuals for each concept. They have to elaborate by finding and picking examples of each concept and identifying another characteristic (pure substance or not).

This is different than using a textbook that conveniently puts everything together and allows students easy access but promotes mindless data entry.

Google It! Active Learning Activity in Google Slides. Click on the image for a copy you can modify.

Third, nothing prevents the teacher from following up and discussing the topics after students discovered their own answers. In fact, it’s advisable to meet in person or virtually to make sure students can correct errors and teachers can address misconceptions. That’s more active learning! Making and correcting of mistakes is a powerful way to learn because we tend to remember mistakes as they evoke emotions and reflection.

This activity works well in a traditional setting (though you have to waste paper on printed copies) as long as students are not given the answers upfront but asked to seek them on their own while the teacher facilitates. I happen to use it in Google Slides as part of the Digital Interactive Chemistry Notebook I created but it is easily applicable to any subject, so grab a copy by clicking on the image above if you’d like to try it.

Label It! Active Learning Activity

The Label It! activity works best in digital formats. I use the specific one below as a digital notebook warm-up review activity the day after the students watched an interactive EdPuzzle video, took notes from it, drew a model of the atom, and recorded a Flipgrid video explaining what the atom looks like using their model.

The arrows with labels are outside of the slide so students can drag them onto the slide to point to the correct parts of the atom they represent. Students are also asked to rotate the arrows to keep them from crowding one area of the slide. My main goal is to provide retrieval practice and teach the chunking strategy with this activity, which involves grouping concepts into chunks of similar logically-connected information. Students first complete it on their own. Then, I pull up the key so they can check their answers and I explain how they can combine 11 pieces of information into 2 brain chunks.

Label It! Active Learning Activity in Google Slides. Click on the image for a copy you can modify.

The Label It! activity can be used as review or as a prior knowledge activity. You can even make it into a guessing-game and ask students to try to guess where the parts of something they have not yet been exposed to go and then show them the answer key so they can see how many they guessed correctly. That last one is probably the best for learning but I’ll have to try it first as I only thought it up now.

Drag, Drop, and Describe Activities

Drag, Drop, and Describe activities can be created using a platform such as Google Slides. The idea is for students to move objects to build something and then to describe the rationale behind it or explain it in their own words.

This type of digital activity works best for previously learned concepts and to practice problem-solving. The one below promotes higher level thinking about elements, compounds, and mixtures all the while being very visual.

First, the student must figure out what the substances given in each box are. Then, she must decide what they form (or break down into, which is a twist many students miss on the last one) based on the description underneath the empty “product” box. Finally, they have to explain the rationale behind their creation.

Elements vs Compounds vs Mixtures Drag, Drop, and Describe Activity - click on image to copy

Combining problem-solving and content learning in this way can be very powerful in learning if done right. Follow up with an explanation is a must to make sure all students can ask questions, get feedback, understand, and level up their critical thinking.

From Manipulation of Info to Creation of Content

The VARK learning styles theory has been debunked as a myth a while ago but evolutionary adaptation and current science agree that multisensory learning increases student achievement and should be used as much as possible. The activities that allow students to not just read and write, but also to use visuals and manipulate objects in the real or virtual worlds lead to increased neuronal interaction in the brain improving memory and understanding.

So does creation of educational content, but that’s next week’s post. Till then…

Key Points

Active learning increases higher order thinking in students. They like it more too.
Manipulating digital content can lead to better memory and understanding of concepts because these tasks require students to process concepts multiple times, in multiple ways, and using multiple senses.

References:

Dolan, E. L., & Collins, J. P. (2015). We must teach more effectively: here are four ways to get started. Molecular biology of the cell, 26(12), 2151–2155.

Richmond, A. S., & Hagan, L. K. (2011). Promoting Higher Level Thinking in Psychology: Is Active Learning the Answer? Teaching of Psychology, 38(2), 102–105.

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How to Create Effective Interactive Digital Lessons

October 20, 2020 / Oskar Cymerman

“A good teacher offers practice, a bad one offers theories.”

— Anthony De Mello

I could just end this post there but I won’t.

Attention Span Studies and Myths and Claims

You might have heard the reason TED Talks are limited to 18 minutes is because neuroscientists suggest that a human adult subjected to such presentations can stay attentive for about that long.

Some studies claim student attentions wane 10-15 minutes into presentations while one academic claims these studies are unreliable due to flawed methodologies and subjective data collection.

Then there’s the Microsoft study that claims our 8-second attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish as this bowl-inhabiting creature can out-attention us by an entire second!

Scientists cannot agree. Marketers measure vanity metrics. Let’s call BS on them and focus on what we, the teachers can do to capture our students’ attentions long enough to educate them. To do this, we need to design lessons they want to participate in because partly dull with a chance of boring just don’t cut it.

How Students Want to Learn

Why should we care about what students want from teachers and how they want to learn?

If you’re in a relationship with someone you care about and they ask you for help and tell you what they want from you, do you just go ahead and disregard them and instead decide what they need and want? I mean, if your partner is reasonable and their requests are not harmful to the world or self-destructive do you listen? Or, do you ignore them and use some patronizing logic to convince them of what’s best for them?

While it’s accurate to say teachers are in a different kind of a relationship with their students, it’s not fair for teachers to assume students are incapable of deciding what they want. In fact, validating reasonable and innocuous student preferences goes a long way in establishing teacher-student relationships in which students feel valued and teachers fulfilled.

Better yet - take the initiative and ask how your students want to learn and they will tell you honestly. Check out this lesson plan I use to get off to a good school year start. In the article, I give away the 14-slide show to go with the lesson that helps me design effective, student-centered lessons and teaches students to use design thinking.

Using the approach above in finding out how students prefer to learn is better suited to a physical classroom setting so teachers must tweak the best face-to-face strategies to fit the COVID-19 models. It’s also important to look into the best hybrid and distance learning practices.

According to this 2019 survey both teachers and students envision a more personalized online learning experience with a high degree of social interaction within the learning community. This 2020 case study recommends faculty training on using online methods and creating interactive lessons that reduce cognitive load. Socially or with learning material - students want to interact.

Effective Interactive Digital Lessons

Taking students to the computer lab so they can type their English essay or read a science article online is not “infusing” or “enhancing” class with technology. Uploading presentations and worksheets into the school’s learning management system (LMS) as primary means of learning is a misuse of resources too, because while lessons become digitized, the learning process remains too passive to be effective and students are left to their own devices to learn the concepts and skills required.

Interactivity is the Key to Creating Effective Digital Lessons

The ultimate goal of any lesson should be to create activities that promote understanding and increase memory of the lesson topics during the lesson, and not leaving those for “later” as homework. This is not to say students will learn and remember everything after “doing” the lesson once. They will not. However, by upping the lesson interactivity, teachers will increase student alertness, escalating their initial understanding and memory of the concepts. The best way to do this is to plan activities that allow real-time processing of concepts and practice of skills.

Effective Interactive Digital Lesson Example

The best digital lessons retain most of the most important parts of effective lesson design - the best practices all teachers should use regardless of how techie or old school the methods they use are.

Starting with lesson design, each digital lesson should include the learning objectives (“I can” statements etc.), an opening activity that promotes review of a previous or engagement in a new topic, front-loading or learning activity which introduces and explains the content to be learned, followed with in-class practice, and concluded with some kind of a summarizing task. All of these need to be supported with clear and concise instructions and transparency in how students will be assessed.

Take a look at the following digital interactive notebook lesson (Google Slides).

Lesson Opening Slide

Warm Up Activity

Shared Digital Board

What is chemistry interactive warm up activity

Front-Loading Activity #1

Effective Digital Lesson Introductory Front-loading activity

Front-Loading Activity #2

Effective Digital Lesson Discovey Activity (front-loading)

Practice Activity #1

Effective Digital Lesson deeper processing activity

Practice Activity #2

Effective Digital Lesson quick practice activity

Practice Activity #3

Effective Digital Lesson challenging practice activity

Quick Summarizing Activity

The first lesson slide includes:

Lesson Title and Objectives
Whether anything will be graded
Other useful information

The second slide contains a Warm Up Activity designed to engage students in thinking about what chemistry is, how it’s used etc. The directions are given to the left to leave the slide available for student use. After clicking on the link, the students are taken to the slide below. It has sticky notes they can use.

The “What is Chemistry? - Brainstorm it!” is an interactive activity designed for small groups or the whole class. The slide serves as a digital board students “stick” their answers to. They type their answers on a few stickies and drag each onto the slide. Click HERE to grab this slide to modify and use in your class.

Instead of being given the information by the teacher, the students are prompted to find it in the textbook or online. They replace the text on the slide with the information they find following directions given to the left.

Here, students dig deeper into the 3 categories (types of matter) from the slide above. The speaker notes section is used to provide a tech tip on how to insert pictures. This activity works well in comparing/contrasting three different concepts from the same category.

The comic activity stimulates deeper thinking about newly learned concepts as students are asked to apply information in a novel way. They are not just restating the facts but creating a story that uses these facts. Click HERE to grab a copy you can modify and use.

This is a simple and quick sorting activity for student self-assessment or one the teacher can use as formative assessment. Students drag the arrows to identify which category each image represents.

This, more challenging practice activity is designed to have students process and apply newly-acquired information in a new way. First, students drag the objects from the left to complete each problem. Then, they are asked to provide a rationale for their answers.

An exit ticket is a tried and true lesson review strategy. In this one, students do a little bit of retrieval practice by identifying what they found most interesting and identifying concepts they need explained further or clarified more.

Making the Learning Last Long Past the Test

By creating introductory lessons students can actively participate in, teachers can lay a foundation for further deeper learning. However, it’s important to note that students must keep practicing by applying the information several times after the initial lesson and it is up to the teacher to make time for classroom-based, not just by-yourself-at-home enrichment activities. Doing so and seeing the results can help teachers become more mindful about achieving deeper learning and less worried about “covering everything,” because the time spent on practice toward achieving mastery is time well-spent.

It’s always more advantageous to focus on learning a few topics/skills really well than to skim only the surface of or cognitively-overload with many concepts. The former way helps the knowledge and skills last, while the latter becomes yet another part of student’s forgotten academic past shortly after the unit test is crammed for and passed.

Key Points

While attention span studies and claims seem unreliable, we can increase student engagement by teaching the way they want to learn and creating effective digital lessons.
To create effective digital lessons, the goal of the teacher should be creating lesson activities that allow students to interact with the class material and/or each other.
Digital media are misused when used solely to “give students the material.” Interactive digital lessons allow students to construct their own understanding.
Providing multiple opportunities for students to process information and practice skills in class improves memory and understanding of concepts.

Sources:

Bradbury, N. A. (2016) Attention span during lectures: 8 seconds, 10 minutes, or more? Advances in Physiology Education, 40:4(509-513).

Mukhtar, K., Javed, K., Arooj, M., & Sethi, A. (2020). Advantages, Limitations and Recommendations for online learning during COVID-19 pandemic era. Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences, 36(COVID19-S4).

Rick L. Shearer, Tugce Aldemir, Jana Hitchcock, Jessie Resig, Jessica Driver & Megan Kohler (2020) What Students Want: A Vision of a Future Online Learning Experience Grounded in Distance Education Theory, American Journal of Distance Education, 34:1, 36-52.

Time Article: You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish (May 14, 2015).

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Why I Want To Crush School And You Should Too

October 08, 2020 / Oskar Cymerman

Kill Teaching and Students Will Crush School

This post contains a few f-bombs. I am human and I do not apologize for it. I am including a bunch of free digital resources teachers can use in an in-person, hybrid, or distance learning classroom at the end of the post so you can just scroll down to find them if cussin’ ain’t your thing.

What is this Crushing School all about?

I recently came across two Twitter posts.

In the first, a brand new teacher from England asked “how unprofessional is it to cry in front of your mentor” about how bad her first lesson went. She must have thought that showing such strong emotions is not okay for a teacher (which by the way shows how much she cared about being a good teacher on her first day).

In the other, much more disturbing post, another new teacher described her experience of being shamed by a more seasoned colleague for doing something wrong and how awful she felt afterward.

The response of other educators on Twitter was overwhelmingly supportive and encouraging in both cases. But I felt disheartened to see the culture of perfectionism and the lack of empathy being still alive and well in education. Students and teachers are often held to impossible standards. This is something we need to change.

Crushing school is about changing outdated pedagogy. It’s about embracing teacher and student mistakes and using them as powerful learning devices. This poster I made shows you how I feel about mistakes. (I’ll tell you how to get one free later).

But, I didn’t always feel this way.

Change Yourself And Things Will Change

Some 7 years ago, which followed 10 years of teaching high school and middle school students, I came to to the realization that I sucked as a teacher. For a decade, I spent too much time worrying about maintaining control and telling my students what to do and not enough time being a human being willing to change myself and my methods to help them change their academic outcomes. In my self-righteousness I forced my way of doing everything on my students no matter the pain I caused or the price I paid because I thought the way I was taught was the way I needed to teach.

It was wrong and I was wrong.

It was bad. I was bad. If school was Hogwarts I’d be a joy-sucking dementor. I was a control freak. I thought I was practicing tough love but I was just tough to love. I kept doing things that frustrated both students and myself. I was going through the motions. I was stressing and I was stressed. Instead of thriving I was barely surviving.

I fucked up my opportunity to change lives. But you see, fucking shit up is a human condition and it’s what we do after we realize we fucked up that defines us.

I made a lot of mistakes but my light bulb came on just before I burned out. My son’s birth changed everything. I wanted to be a good father and I realized that what I do and how I do it in other realms of life impact me as a whole. I needed to get better as a husband, teacher, friend, and human.

Crushing Teaching So They Can Crush School

First therapy. Then empathy. Now, I share a flexible learning space and find happiness being among my students. I ask them how they are and what they need and want. They often don’t know what they want but if I look closely and listen intently I can make out what they need. I learn from them. I get schooled by them which prompts me to seek answers in the Cybersphere. I read. I listen. I watch. I create something new. I try it. I fail or I succeed. I reflect. If I failed, I try again and do it better. I keep trying and improving. I keep progressing. I keep creating. I don’t mind the work because creating things is my jam and it keeps me moving forward.

I come here to write articles on what I discover about the art of teaching and learning from various (some less traditional) sources. I find teaching and learning stuff others swear by, I try it, and break it down into what works and what needs work. I like to consume content only loosely related to education so I tweak it and implement it in my classroom. I talk about it honestly on this blog.

If you let me, I’ll share my experiences - mistakes, successes, and epiphanies. I’m betting on mistakes to be of greatest value as we can learn from them the most. Major mistakes can be painful and I hope by sharing mine you can avoid a few yourself. But I also hope you will allow yourself to take some chances and make mistakes. Doing so will help you grow when you reflect and course-correct.

But this blog is just a partial answer.

So How Do We Crush School?

It’s up to each teacher to get better to make learning better and still keep it real for his or her students. My rough start taught me we all can choose to change. And on occasion, if we pay attention and try hard enough we can change the world for a student who really needs it changing. That’s crushing school.

This is why I try new things, look to create unique learning experiences, and always tell my students why I do these things - things others don’t do and things my students are not yet accustomed to. I hope to help them understand that I am trying different ways for them to learn the skills they’ll need in the best way possible.

Sometimes I fail, I figure out why, and I share insights and alternatives. When I strike teaching gold I get super excited and I share it with anyone willing to listen.

In my writing, I aim to be theoretical and practical… and human, because I’ve learned that’s the most important play in the teaching game. I explain the what, the why, and the how and usually give resources teachers can use in their courses.

Simply put, I am making up for my decade of darkness by coming up with ways for teachers to kill it so students can crush it.

Because teachers have the power to change lives. We just need a reminder and some encouragement to use it often.

Thanks for reading! You can grab the Mistakes Are… poster and other digital posters as well as learning to learn books and lessons here after you sign up for my weekly newsletter in which I give away teaching and learning strategies and resources.

Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, and create to make teaching easier and learning simpler.

BOOKS

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