This spring, as a volunteer in a sixth-grade classroom at Castillero Middle School in California’s San Jose Unified School District, I taught a lesson where I watched kids climb over desks.
They weren’t misbehaving. They were crossing the Pamir Mountains on the Silk Road. They were ducking bandits, trading goods in ancient cities and debating which route was safer. Six classes came through that day. Every class had different energy, different abilities, different dynamics. They were all electric.
That feeling is what I have been working towards for more than 36 years. The lesson works. The problem is that, although thousands of teachers across the nation have access to active lessons like this one, many still revert to textbooks, lectures and worksheets. Why does that keep happening, and what will it take to break the habit?
The problem has always been the same
When I was mentoring student teachers at Stanford in the late 1980s, I watched something I came to think of as “silent violence.” Classrooms full of kids who had been told, in every way possible, that their job was to be quiet, sit down, listen, record and regurgitate. The most innovative thing I saw in most classrooms was a Friday quiz bowl.
I went into teaching because I believed social studies and science were the subjects best equipped to help students feel like citizens of a complex, fascinating world. What I saw instead was curricula designed to make that world small, flat and forgettable.
Walk into most classrooms today, and the dominant model is still: worksheet, textbook, lecture, repeat. The worksheets are digital now, but the underlying assumption hasn’t changed: Learning is something that happens to students, not something they do.
What active learning actually means
I want to be precise, because “active learning” has become attached to anything involving a student moving a slider on a screen or answering a multiple-choice question on a tablet. That’s not what I mean. Real active learning is built on three interconnected foundations.
- Multimodal learning is the principle that the most effective lessons offer multiple ways for students to access content, including visuals, movement, interactive exercises and group work. Using a variety of modalities helps reach all learners and strengthens their understanding of key concepts, including through nonlinguistic representation such as graphic organizers, mental images and bodily-kinesthetic activities that help students store and retrieve information more effectively.
- Jerome Bruner’s spiral curriculum starts with concrete, accessible concepts and returns to them with increasing complexity over time.
- A cooperative classroom is an environment where students trust each other and their teacher enough to argue, move, take risks and occasionally be wrong in front of their peers.
These ideas are powerful in theory, but the gap between a good theory and a changed classroom is implementation, which lives or dies on what you put in a teacher’s hands.
The real barrier is usability
Most teachers are not resistant to active learning. What stops them is the gap between “I want to do this” and “I can actually do this on Monday morning.” For example, a lesson that requires a teacher to gather three types of moths, cut them into shapes, find black paper, white paper and newspaper, and assemble it all before a 45-minute class is a lesson that will not get taught. Not because the teacher doesn’t care, but because caring isn’t enough when you’re managing 30 students, multiple subjects and a stack of IEPs.
So I redesigned that lesson. Now the moths come outlined on an activity card. The students do the cutting. I created an animation that shows exactly how to run it, so there are no written instructions to interpret. I removed every barrier I could find, and then I looked for more.
This is the most important work right now: not creating new lessons, but making existing lessons impossible to skip.
Video that’s active by design
Building lessons that are impossible to skip is only half the battle. The other half is making sure every entry point, including video, earns its place.
When districts started asking me for more video a few years ago, my heart sank. I had spent 36 years pulling students out of passive learning environments, and video felt like a beautiful, well-produced way to put them right back into one. The solution is to keep videos shorter than two minutes and always pair them with activities: drag-and-drop, true/false, drawing, writing or movement. In active learning classrooms, video does something that physical activity alone can’t. It layers academic vocabulary and visual geography onto an embodied experience, and the combination produces critical thinking.
The proof is in the room
Active learning, done well, isn’t a novelty that produces engagement for its own sake. It creates a classroom where students do the thinking because the lesson was designed to make that possible, and the teacher has everything they need to run it.
The challenge to implementing active learning is helping teachers believe — and feel, and see — that their students are capable of so much more than a worksheet can ask of them. And then giving those teachers everything they need to prove it, on a Monday morning, with 30 kids in front of them and 10 minutes to set up.
That is the work. It has always been the work. And it is nowhere near finished.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
Subscribe to SmartBrief’s FREE email newsletters to see the latest hot topics on educational leadership in ASCD and ASCDLeaders. They’re among SmartBrief’s more than 200 industry-focused newsletters.