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GTP Handbook
Active Learning in the University: An Inquiry into Inquiry
Martin Bickman, Professor
Department of EnglishCopyright ©2002, Graduate Teacher Program
If I had to distill the problem with current university teaching in one sentence, I would point to the fallacy that something can be taught merely by being told, that education is simply the transmission of already formulated facts and concepts from the teacher's notes to the students' notes and then back to the teacher again in the form of exam answers. Although we know better on a deeper level--after all, college professors by some means or other have all become effective learners themselves--in our teaching practice we lapse into the notion that there can be such a thing as what Imre Kakatos terms "instant learning" (p.174). Part of our problem is that our ends forget their beginnings--a particularly ironic kind of amnesia at a research institution--and we come to think of an "idea" as a thing, a static entity that is some what coterminous with its formulation rather than an activity of the mind encountering something else (or itself). Perhaps this reification can be blamed on our grammar--the fact that "idea," "concept," "mind'" and "fact" are nouns--but the problem is more deeply rooted in our 'schoolmarmish' and positivistic ideas about ideas. As Peter Elbow puts it, summarizing "cognitive psychologists' functional, process-oriented model of the mind":
Ideas aren't things or even truths that the mind sits in the middle and knows, but rather activities that follow certain rules; or the dispositions to perform such activities. And the mind isn't a thing or a place or a knower but is the shape of those activities or rules (p. 11).
At the center of the model that Elbow refers to is the work of Piaget, whose comments on the relation of what psychologists know about learning to the actual practice of pedagogy deserve quotation at length:
The essential functions of intelligence consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words in building up structures by structuring reality....Whereas the older theories of intelligence (empirical associations, etc.) emphasized understanding and looked upon invention as the mere discovery of already existing realities, more recent theories, on the other hand, increasingly verified by facts, subordinate understanding to invention, looking upon the latter as the expression of a continual construction process building up structured wholes....The fact that intelligence derives from action an interpretation in conformity with the French-speaking psycho logical tradition of the past few decades, leads up to this fundamental consequence; even in its higher manifestations, when it can only make progress by using the instruments of thought, intelligence still consists in executing and coordinating actions, though in an interiorized and reflexive form (pp. 27-29).
In other words, and grammar is on our side here, "to know" is by definition an active verb. This Piagetian view of how the mind creates knowledge dovetails with constructivism, a contemporary philosophical movement that, as Jerome Bruner suggests, in his most recent book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, has powerful potential for reuniting philosophy with psychology. The two most important tenets of constructivism for our inquiry are that what we know depends on how we come to know it and that the knowledge we construct does not so much match an external reality as fit it.
I will use an example first given by Paul Watzlawick (pp.14-15) to illustrate both of these related ideas: It was a dark and stormy night. A sea captain without charts has managed to steer his ship through a long, narrow, dangerous channel. The very fact that he has survived proves his course did not directly conflict with the actual shape of the strait, but it also does not give us the only or the best course or the exact topography; in other words, in a functional sense, his course worked or "fit" the existing reality but did not necessarily map or "match" it. Most of our hypotheses and formulations have a similar status. We make them not in a vacuum but with certain goals in specific contexts. And only by making them ourselves can we be fully aware of their provisional nature, of the amount of hunch, serendipity, blind luck, false starts involved. As one of Zora Neale Hurston's characters says, "you got tuh go there tuh know there" (p.285).
To return to Bruner's title, there are a range of possible "worlds" that "fit." Two common errors of traditional education are to make students think the worlds we present to them in our courses really "match," i.e., correlate directly with the structure of reality, and to simply give them our own final formulations, saving them the effort of making their own knowledge. For, as I have suggested, knowing is a set of active processes--perceiving, creating, inventing, formulating, articulating, and not necessarily in this or any other linear order. Truman Capote once harshly said of Jack Kerouac's work that it's not writing, it's typing. Capote, I feel, was wrong here, but I have to say just as harshly of our educational efforts that most of it is not teaching, it's talking.
Clearly, I did not at some point reach these formulations about learning and then try to put them into practice; rather they evolved in an interplay with my own teaching experiences, and when I could find confirmation and conceptualization of them in other writers such as Piaget and the constructivists, I shamelessly and eagerly appropriated them. The notion of evolution, though, is also misleading, for I think I could be teaching for 20 more years without making much more progress if it were not for a restructuring of my own teaching situation.
Before I go on to describe my own experiences and methods in detail--which of necessity will be mainly about the English classroom--I do want to speak to the issue of active inquiry across the curriculum. When I have spoken about my methods to people outside my discipline, a frequent response is that my methods may work in my own field, which lends itself particularly to individual interpretation and to process rather than content, but what about those in the hard sciences where we are trying to impart a certain body of knowledge in a limited amount of time? My answer is that I do not believe that one discipline is more susceptible that another to active learning; while my own particular methods may not be directly transferable, but may serve only as suggestive analogues, certainly there is no subject of discipline that naturally or intrinsically lends itself to the lecture format. Indeed, I would argue that it is even more important in the "harder" fields to give students a sense of where concepts and formulations come from, to make their learning experiential and active. I leave the specifics of this argument, though, to an extremely successful physics professor, Arnold Arons, whose article "Teaching Science" is cited in the bibliography , and to a briefer piece on teaching mathematics by G. Stephen Monk. Although I discovered the Arons piece only after most of my own sections here were written, I agree completely with his vision of teaching, however strident and aggressive his tone may sometimes be. I dissociate myself only from his last section, where he is unduly cautious and pessimistic about what can be done in large courses. Indeed, the article by Monk speaks directly to what can actually be achieved by restructuring the typical large lecture classes.
Alternatives to the Lecture "Lecture" comes from the Latin lectio, a noun related to the verb legere, to read. In the great medieval universities, when books had to be painstakingly copied by hand, one of the main functions of a lecture was to disseminate book knowledge orally. One might expect, then, that after Guttenberg and certainly after Xerox that this format would be less widely used in university education. And yet it endures; it may even prevail. It has survived the severest kind of scorn, such as Ezre Poind's comment: "The lecturer is a man who must talk for an hour. France may possibly have acquired the intellectual leadership of Europe when their academic period was cut down to forty minutes" (p. 83).
In my own experience, as I lectured and looked around the classroom, I consistently saw upturned, interested faces. But I did not realize how much my looking affected the the very behavior I was trying to see, how I was enacting a kind of Heisenberg principle. John Holt has described the process well:
A teacher in a class is like a man in the woods at night with a powerful flashlight in his hand. Wherever he turns his light, the creatures on whom it shines are aware of it, and do not behave as they do in the dark.... Shine where he will, he can never know very much of the night life of the woods (pp. 33-34).
But it was not simply this perceptual difficulty that created the gap. The difference also has to do with the inherent differences between talking and listening, between being able to move about and being confined to a seat, between being a lecturer and a lecturee. I blush to say it, but I was never bored or tired by my own lectures-even when I had to fill up the hour and a quarter slot of our Tuesday/Thursday courses. And yet I know I cannot keep my mind from wandering during the same length of time when listening to even an excellent lecture by someone else. As Clark Bouton and Russell Garth put it:
The active role of the teacher in the traditional classroom contrasts sharply with the passive role of students. It is not surprising that teaching is the best learning. The teacher's activity makes the traditional method a very effective method of learning--for the teacher (p. 78).
This realization helped explain why often what I thought were the most brilliantly original parts of my lectures lagged the most for the students: I was thinking things out for the first time, discovering what I hadn't fully seen before but these ideas by their very nature weren't yet in a form that was particularly clear or incisive to my listeners. These were also my most enthusiastic moments of lecturing, but they clearly were not the ones that created the most enthusiasm in the students. I mention this for those who think enthusiasm works like a virus: if the teacher is enthusiastic those in proximity will catch the bug. Although I had frequently made stabs at running discussions, particularly after my own lecture, my basic stance toward teaching was similar to what Stephen Monk describes:
Any mathematician will tell you that there is only one way to learn mathematics, and that is to do mathematics. From what I knew about my own lectures and from what I gathered about quiz sections and office hours, my TAs and I spent all the course time telling students how we did mathematics. Their job was to imitate us when they did the homework. The message was that learning was to take place not on course time, but on their own time, away from teachers and away from one another (p. 8).
The implications of all this became evident-- Why should we horde all the wealth and shoulder all the responsibility? Why have just one person prepare for a class when every student could benefit from such preparation?
I should mention that as far as my own lectures go I have not succumbed to complete abstinence. I still give lectures, although usually for no more than 30 minutes at a time and those times distributed throughout the semester. For one thing, it is difficult to give up completely the narcissistic satisfaction of having an entire roomful of people, an ideal captive audience, listening--or appearing to listen--to your every word. More important for the class, it gives me a forum where I can just say what I feel needs saying or what I want to say about a book or an author without trying to slip these ideas into or otherwise distort what should be truly open-ended discussions. Further, I ask my students to speak out clearly and strongly as part of the work of the course, and this charge carries a little more moral suasion if the instructor puts himself or herself on the line occasionally, however dubious the actual learning value may be.
There is one more reason for lecturing often mentioned as helpful by both undergraduates and graduates but about which I am more dubious-- that of giving "information" or "background." But as the research seems to support (Bowman, Thompson), the lecture is one of the least efficient methods for doing this. I sometimes run off for my classes authors' biographies from a book like The Norton Anthology of American Literature. And while there is usually in each of these biographies a few points that I feel are omitted or overemphasized, it takes far less time to speak briefly in class to these points than to repeat the large amount of material with which I do concur. Further, increasingly I've been able to find good short films on some of the authors I teach, such as Emily Dickinson: A Certain Slant of Light, which our media center owns, that makes a greater impact on students than my own lectures.
To explain a last legitimate use I have for lecturing, I will have to get ahead of myself a bit. What I have found as the best alternative to the lecture format is the structured and prepared discussion--structured by the instructor by specific questions on which the students are to write, prepared for by each student in that act of writing. To run an entire class discussion without the students doing this writing is inevitably to have a discussion without the energy, depth of thought, and participation of the prepared discussion, an experience not only unpleasant in itself but sometimes inhibiting and demoralizing to a class's entire sense of being able to discuss productively with each other. To avoid burnout, though, and sometimes outright mutiny, one has to give students some vacations from writing, and the lecture format seems to work just as well--or just as poorly--if the students have not written for the class.
Writing for Each Class: Worksheets
It is impossible to overstate the importance of student writing in creating active learning. As the topic is positioned in this article, one might think that the main reason for having students write is to improve class discussion. And while I think it is the crucial tool for this, I am also convinced that if one were to teach a traditional lecture course and make the single change of having the students write for each class, the quality and nature of that course would be radically improved.As mentioned, in one way or another we've all managed to become effective learners, so we can often get important clues for improving our teaching by observing carefully our own work habits. In preparing for a lecture, no one I know just reads and thinks. The real work is done on paper, whether we make notes and outlines, or actually write the lecture in sentences and paragraphs. In doing so, we acknowledge that writing is not merely the setting down of what we already know, of what is already in our heads but is itself a method of discovery, a way of knowing. We push our vague, fuzzy thoughts to clarity; we find the very act of writing makes us articulate things we didn't know we know. As W.H. Auden has said, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"
In an even deeper sense, my own experiences as a teacher have convinced me that knowledge is not really one's own unless it is articulated. I have heard it said that you don't really know something unless you can articulate it; I would go further to say you don't really know it until you articulate it. Before it is written or spoken our knowledge remains locked in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, numbers, formulae, it becomes objective, something external we can then scrutinize, examine, revise. In the past few years those who have wanted to reunite reading and writing in my own discipline have made the point often and convincingly that the act of reading and the act of writing are essentially both acts of interpretation; to return to Piaget, to construe is to construct, to understand is to invent. Writing about what one has read moves the whole process into a fuller dimension and makes the act of reading more active, more deliberate, more intense, and more relevant to one's immediate experience.
Most often, the amount of writing we assign is dictated by the amount we think we can read and still maintain our sanity; we often give less writing to large classes--although often these are the classes that need it most, since there is less opportunity for discussion. There really is no reason to read every word each student writes for every class. We can sample in a number of ways, such as reading the set of assignments only for some classes not announced beforehand or reading the assignments of a handful of students for each class. I prefer the latter, since I want some feedback on every assignment I construct, but all kinds of variations are workable. Even more effective is to have the students encourage and comment upon each other's work regularly. In any case, the students should be encouraged to save, reread, summarize, edit, draw connections and conclusions among their own assignments through formal papers or other tasks that ask them specifically to do this.
After a good deal of experimentation, the format for writing I've found most effective is something that has come to be known as the worksheet, although I would prefer to think of it as a playsheet. Basically this is a list of questions to which the students are asked to respond informally, as if they were writing first drafts or journals, without worrying overmuch about spelling, punctuation, and other matters on which their ignorance may have been occasions for previous English teachers to clobber them. The care and imagination with which the instructor structures the worksheet is crucial. I try to bring to bear on constructing the worksheets all the insight and knowledge that I would previously have tried to dispense during the class hour itself. The greatest challenge is, though, to have the worksheets structured but still open-ended. The problem with several "discovery" approaches to learning is that what the students are supposed to discover is predetermined and carefully controlled; the fix is already in.
To say more about the relation of the worksheets to other kinds of course writing, I must recount one of my perennial surprises, the dullness of students' first formal papers compared to their worksheets; for if I had only the formal papers to go on, as most teachers do, I would come to the same harsh judgment--that students cannot read, write, think critically, or whatever students are currently not supposed to be able to do. As in the classroom itself, to measure something is to change it. And whatever pleas or disclaimers I make before the papers are due, the situation itself activated the mind-set with which students have approached the task in previous courses. Students who are lively and original in their worksheets--and most of them become so quickly--suddenly revert to a discourse that is stilted, tentative, vacuous. One gets introductions that begin with the nature of the universe and funnel down to some nearly tautological thesis statement, conclusions that merely reprint the topic sentence of each previous paragraph. The act of writing often becomes again for students an adversary situation, where the student's goal is to get as quickly as possible through the minefield with the minimum of red ink exploding in his or her face.
Since my initial shock, I have found ways to ease students into the formal writing situation more naturally, having them read their drafts out loud to each other and revise them in small groups. But the disparities I found are instructive, and the reasons for them go beyond the procrustean forms of organization through which many students are taught to write and the error-centered approach by which they are graded. More fundamental are the premature demands placed on student writing for something called "clarity." When I go over papers and point out to students some element in the test that seems to run counter to their "thesis," a frequent response is: "Well, I saw that, but it would be wrecked my whole paper to put it in." In our demands that students be clear, be immediately intelligible at tachistoscopic speed, we often encourage their own impatience with complexities and contradictions, with the difficulties of process in order to crank out some kind of gradable product on time. The situation is exacerbated when writing becomes a separate course isolated from genuine academic inquiry and narrowly focused on issues of form and rhetorical strategy. For, to paraphrase Robert Frost, no discovery in the writer, no discovery in the reader. If the student is not actively engaged in learning something new but forced to write, say, a description of a room or a comparison-contrast paper on "anything," the prose, however neat and correct, is going to be deadly. The views of David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky are a welcome alternative:
It's this lesson that we want to teach students: that reading and writing begin in confusion, anxiety and uncertainty; that they are driven by chance and intuition as much as they are by deliberate strategy or conscious intent; and that certainty and authority are postures, features of performance that are achieved through an act of speaking or writing; they are not qualities of vision that precede such performance (p. 105).
In helping students to write, then, we don't want to have them excise their most problematical writing but instead to push even harder on those knots where the deepest kind of insights are likely to emerge.
Running Discussions
How do the worksheets shape and create class discussion? The most obvious and important way is in the number and the nature of students participating. The pattern in most of the discussion classes I observe is that the number of students repeatedly speaking ranges from five to ten no matter what the size of the class itself. One reason for this--and I was unaware of the extent until we began to break my classes up into smaller discussion groups--is that many of the non-speakers just haven't done the reading. I do not mean to bemoan student laziness; it is more that left completely to their own devices, many students prefer to do or end up doing the reading only after the class discussion-a strategy that may work for them as individuals but is unfair to the class as a whole. I often make the worksheets the ticket of admission to class discussions; if students come unprepared, I set off a section of the room usually a corner, where they begin doing the reading or the writing right there and then. While there is clearly a punitive aspect to this, what I try to stress is the cooperative nature of the class as a place where students should not be allowed to take if they do not have at least the potential to give.But even if one could insure that every student was prepared, the problem of just a few speakers would still remain, even if not quite as severely. Sometimes the students that do talk are the best in the class, but more often they are just the glibbest or the quickest, not necessarily the deepest thinkers. Preparing the worksheets gives the more deliberate and careful thinkers a chance to articulate their ideas, making them far readier to speak on their own. Further, the act of writing gives them not only an occasion to rehearse but gives them more of a stake in the discussion, increases their commitment to a position they have now formed. And if, as often happens, some of the brightest students are also the shyest, the least self-assured, the worksheets make it easier to call on them or draw them out in other ways with the minimum of embarrassment. I frequently begin classes by going around the room having each student say a couple of sentences--or read from their sheets if they prefer--what they felt their most significant discovery was. In terms of process, this helps break the ice--everyone has already spoken--and in terms of content it puts a number of fruitful, provoking, often conflicting positions up on the table. After everyone has had a chance to speak, which usually takes no more than ten minutes in a 25-person class, it is sometimes difficult to moderate the flow of students wanting to speak, challenging and building on their classmates' statements.
A question frequently raised, however, is whether it should be a primary goal to have everyone speak. If the discussion among a few students is animated and productive and if the other students seem to be following it with interest, why push to include everyone? My answer is analogous to my reasons for having everyone write; one learns more by articulating instead of just absorbing. Even students who speak only once or twice in the hour seem more engaged--judging by their expressions and body language than those who try to be just bystanders. Further there are times in the rhythms of learning that one wants to generate as many and as widely divergent responses as possible, and what one gets from a handful of talkers cannot compare in richness to a symphony from the entire class.
In terms of preparing for the discussion, less important than the worksheets, but still of some significance is the physical setup of the room. The typical classroom formation, the charts according to which the custodians are to restore our rooms, is one of the most inimical to discussion. All students are pointed at the teacher, and what they most easily see of one another are the backs of their necks. Far more conducive is a circular arrangement where the students naturally face and can turn to each other. There is no front of the room, except perhaps for where the teacher is seated, and he or she can alter this as the dynamics warrant by getting up and walking around the outside of the circle, most often diametrically opposed to the student speaking, to move the discussion across the entire room.
Beyond worksheets and physical arrangements, though, there are other techniques, strategies, tricks that can help us in running discussions. In fact, I've found it particularly gratifying to work with graduate students and colleagues on these techniques because improvement is so rapid and dramatic. More often than not, it is a matter of giving up bad habits than of learning a new set of complex skills. One of these widespread habits is the hidden agenda, where the teacher really has his own points to make but tries to pull them out of the students instead of saying them directly. As mentioned above, I frequently have to purge myself of this temptation through the catharsis of giving my own mini lectures. Although the agenda itself may be hidden, the fact that there is one soon becomes apparent as student comments are either reinforced or rejected in accordance with their proximity to the teacher's line of thought and not weighed and examined in the open marketplace of class reaction.
Even when teachers renounce their own agendas, they sometimes retain some vestigial habits that inhibit open discussion. The most common of these is the feeling that the teacher must make some kind of response to every student comment, that he or she has to pass judgment or acknowledge in some other way--even with just an "uh-huh" what every student says. This blocks a normal flow of discussion by making the teacher a kind of central switchboard, to which all comments are addressed and only then sent back out to the rest of the class. I sometimes call this the "ping-pong-effect," where the ball goes back and forth from class to teacher to class again. Having the students move their chairs in the circle pattern does help to break this up somewhat, but it will not entirely solve the problem. Just as we are used to speaking in response to each comment, students are used to speaking directly to us. Sometimes it is helpful, then, to explicitly direct students during the first few discussions to speak to the entire class. If this seems too awkward or blunt, one can try the techniques of not looking directly at the person speaking but instead out at the other members of the class. While students at first find this disconcerting, they soon get the message and themselves search the room for eye-contact with other students.
The habit of speaking after each student is a special case of our general tendency to talk too much, to not allow enough silence in the classroom and to not make the students themselves feel responsible for breaking the silence. I know what a difficult habit this is to break, since even though I recognized the importance of silence from my first year of teaching, I really wasn't able to wait out the students as long as I knew I should until I had a group of graduate students looking over my shoulder, making sure I practiced what I preached. One thing that helps is realizing that the silences are never as long to the rest of the class as they seem to the teacher who usually feels too much responsibility for them. Another thing to remember is that silence is not a vacuum; people don't stop thinking during silences, and indeed, they are sometimes necessary for genuine thought to occur. Classes are rarely experienced as slow or boring because of too much silence but more usually because of too much superficiality, of people not really listening to and building on each others' comments.
Once one has learned to let an open discussion happen, though, certain anxieties remain. What happens if it gets to "open," if students seem to become too diffuse, too anecdotal, too digressive? I used to handle my own feelings about this by mentally allowing each class period 10 minutes of what I thought of as a "bullshit quota" in the interests of keeping the flow of discussion lively and unimpeded. But as I spoke more to my students it became clear to me that one person's bullshit is another's insight. A more formal way of conceptualizing this is to use Vygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development." A more-advanced student may actually be able to teach a less advanced student more effectively than a professor because the students speak the same language and are at a closer level of development. What may seem banal or intuitively obvious for the professor, who may have passed this way decades ago and forgotten his own learning processes, may need to be stated, clarified, reiterated, explicated by students for each other. What I've found to be increasingly important for good teaching--more so than intelligence or eloquence--is a kind of steady patience and confidence in the ability of the mind to construct its own orders and create its own patterns.
It is for these reasons that I have come to rely more on small student groups from four to eight as a way of beginning many classes. Students share their answers to the worksheets, and then, more importantly, formulate what questions or issues they feel are still unresolved and which they want to raise with the entire class. It was particularly encouraging to find that the groups could be rigorously tough with each other, and were rarely content with what they felt were partial or glib answers. There is a videotape, available from the Faculty Teaching Excellence Program or from the English Department office, that shows this technique being used in a class of 100 students that Stephen Swords and I taught.
As this list of suggestions proceeds, it seems to have a teleology that can be described as the withering away of the teacher. And indeed after presenting these techniques at a colloquy for other professors here I was asked what the university was paying me for? I answered that my goal is to become the first Montessori teacher at a university level, that I see my primary tasks as setting up structures in which learning will take place. Boulder already has enough gurus. But also behind the snideness of the question there is a suspicion that turns out to be true--that using inquiry methods usually takes less of a professor's time than the traditional methods, especially that of giving lectures for each class meeting. Much more time, of course, is spent preparing for each class session, but that time is distributed in a fairer and more effective way by all the participants. Hopefully, we can diminish for ourselves what Finkel and Monk have called the "Atlas complex," where a professor feels he has to shoulder all the weight of responsibility for every aspect of the course.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky. Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course. Upper Monclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook, 1986.
Bouton, Clark and Russell Y. Garth. "Students in Learning Groups: Active Learning Through Conversation." In Learning in Groups, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 14 (June 1983): pp. 73-82.
Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.
Finkel, Donald L. and G. Stephen Monk. "Teachers and Learning in Groups: Dissolution of the Atlas Complex." In Learning in Groups, New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 14 (June 1983): pp. 83-97.
Holt, John. How Children Fail. 1964. Rev. ed. New York: Delta, 1982.
Hurston, Zora Heale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.
Monk, G. Stephen. "Student Engagement and Teacher Power in Large Classes." In Learning in Groups. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, Number 14 (June 1983): pp.7-12.
Piaget, Jean. Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child. Trans. Derek Coltman. New York: Orion, 1970.
Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Eds. M. Cole, S. Scibner, V. John Steiner, and E. Souderman. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978.
--This article was excerpted from On Teaching, edited by Mary Ann Shea, Faculty Teaching Excellence Program, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1987.
