When administrators leave their offices and conduct walk-throughs, they look for evidence of active learning. When we communicate home to parents that we want students to “participate more” or be on their phone less, we promote active learning. When students are hands-on and minds-on in the classroom, they are active learning.
Indeed, we want students to actively learn rather than be passive lumps in the classroom. This is because we know how important it is to engage students and for them to be engaged in the time that we have them.
Many high school English teachers, for example, have fewer than 50 minutes a day with students. Fifty minutes to teach students to read, to write, to speak, to listen, to use technology, to collaborate, to . . . do any number of important, necessary things. Those fifty minutes a day help shape the lifetime of minutes after.
So how can we make the most of them?
Active Learning Benefits
John Dewey, an educational researcher, noted this about active learning: “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.”
In other words, giving students a definition to memorize, for instance, doesn’t promote active learning. Instead, give them something to do with the word. Use it in a sentence. Draw a picture of it. Make a game and try to guess the word from it. This is active learning, and there are active learning benefits that come from it.
According to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Educational Innovation, active learning benefits are “improved critical thinking skills, increased retention and transfer of new information, increased motivation, improved interpersonal skills, and decreased course failure.”
That list above looks pretty good to me! There’s a good case, then, (backed by solid research) that educators should use active learning methods and active learning strategies in the classroom to improve student learning. Let’s dig in and see how we can do that when we teach and read fiction.
Active Learning Strategies for Fiction
Think-Pair-Share. Active learning centers on getting students’ brains tuned-in and turned-on to what’s in front of them. This includes the content, the skills, and often the people they are with. This active learning method includes collaboration with other students. In short, students have some individual think time, then turn to a partner or group, then share their thinking.
Students could read a text or consider a question you pose and then turn and talk. In the talk, the students get to both articulate their thinking to help an audience understand. In turn, carefully consider how others’ thinking supports or challenges their own, synthesizing together multiple viewpoints or interpretations. This strategy helps with both critical thinking and interpersonal skills.
Literature Circles/Jigsaw. If we are reading fiction, we must do that just: read. As such, we can put that active learning center on how we read a text, not just what we are reading. With literature circles and jigsaws, students each have a role and a part to play. For example, one student might be in charge of vocabulary, defining words for the group as they read. One student might be in charge of tracing theme developing, noting moments where the theme is emerging early in the text and then developing later in the text. Another student might be in charge of characterization, identifying characters and noting the impressions they make on readers.
Or, better yet, try having different students be “discussion leaders” who are responsible for a particular lit circle group meeting. You could also try having meetings be product and/or skills-oriented – having students focus on hexagonal thinking for one meeting, for example.
Double-Entry Journals. A text on the page (or these days, on the screen) is static and unmoving unless students manipulate it or interact with it. This active learning method helps students engage and interact with a text.
There are different ways to set up these journals. For instance, in a notebook, you could have students divide the paper in half and then, on one side, include something from the text and then the other something from their thinking. For example, on the left side they may copy down powerful quotations or summarize a moving moment. And on the right, they could interpret/analyze/react. These back-and-forth between columns, then, show the students’ interactions with the text.
Annotations. When students read, active learning can happen as the students mark the text.” This comes in many forms from writing in the margins of a page to attaching sticky notes to paragraphs to highlighting the text.
Whatever shape it takes, annotations are powerful indicators of close, careful reads. Students should wrestle with, connect to, and dive into the text. You might assign students x-number of annotations per chapter or per paragraph. Or as a formative assessment, you might just ask the students to annotate what they “notice” in a text to see what kind of readers they are and what textual cues and clues they pick up on.
Gallery Walks. Giving students the opportunity to move in the classroom is helpful for active learning as the students are, get this, active physically. Take inspiration from an art gallery and ask your students to walk around the room and discuss/analyze/interpret students’ “works of art.”
They could, for instance, draw a scene or character from a book, incorporating as many textual details as possible, to put on display. Or students could be a “living display” stationed in the room while other students walk around and hear directly from the student. So, for example, a student might be the “theme” in a gallery walk. Students would walk and visit this student’s station to hear about a theme in the fiction text.
Fishbowl Discussions. Like the Gallery Walks above, Fishbowl Discussions are about public presentations of information: taking in something, digesting it, thinking about it, and then sharing it back with an audience. With a fishbowl, there’s an inner and outer circle of students.
Those on the inside are the speakers engaged in discourse. Those on the outside are the listeners and/or notetakers. The inner circle, those in the fishbowl, discuss . . . something, while those in the outer circle pay attention to what’s being said, how it’s being said, and what they want to say in response. As part of a fishbowl’s facilitation, you can allow as you can make it so students can tap-in to discussions, swapping positions in the inner and outer circles.
Story Mapping. This might also be known as plot diagramming, as Story Maps are just that: diagrams of a story’s unfolding actions, characterization, conflict, and plot. When we are reading fiction with students, we want them to understand how the author moves the character from points A to B. We want them to understand how the theme begins to develop and emerges, how conflict rises and falls.
Story Mapping allows students to see these changes in a text in a visual format. As they read, they create a road map of sorts to help them follow the story. This can also be used to make predictions for what’s ahead. (“Knowing where the characters have been on the journey, based on your Story Mapping, where do you think they’ll end up at the end of the story?”)
Hot Seating. No hot sauce necessary for this, but students might be familiar with the Hot Ones interview series (which can be found on YouTube). This is a way to introduce them to the concept of Hot Seating. In short, one student at a time takes the “Hot Seat” while you the teacher (or other students) grill them with questions.
These questions can be unseen ahead of time. Or for more support, you can give students a menu of possible questions you might ask them so they can do some preparation ahead of time. With this active learning strategy, you can can bring in some metacognition. Ask students which questions made them “squirm” the most and process the difficulty of the questions and/or the text to reflect on learning.
Character Social Media Profiles as a fun book project. Students are growing up in a world of digital profiles and Internet lives. Use that as inspiration for this active learning method. As students are reading fiction and growing their understanding of characters, have them create digital lives for them. What would Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird tweet? What would a TikTok from Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet look like? Students can take their knowledge of the characters and stories and be creative, grounding creative choices in textual evidence.
Soundtrack Creation. Much like the Social Media Profiles above, this is a creative active learning strategy. Let’s say you are going to do a read aloud of a section of text. You could jigsaw the section and ask students to create a soundtrack to capture the mood. Students would, then, justify their soundtrack choices with textual evidence. Bonus extension: play that soundtrack while you read or different tracks while you read. Then discuss the effect of the choices and why it works/what works best.
One Minute Paper. Oftentimes we think of essays as multi-page, multi-day efforts that are a bore to write and a slog to read. We can challenge that with a One Minute Paper. As an exit ticket or classroom activity, ask students to write for one minute straight on a prompt you give them about the text. They have 1 minute to develop a thesis about the fiction text and then as much as they can defend/support/prove that thesis. The fun’s in the scramble of them writing what they know as fast as they can. They can then submit these to you for feedback and check-ins.
BONUS: Try Hexagonal Thinking or Harkness Discussions or Podcasting to name a few strategies I’ve blogged about previously.
Using any (or all) of the active learning methods above can turn your classroom into an active learning center full of active learning benefits. To be honest, the more active students are the more actively we enjoy teaching! Bonus!
Teaching Critical Thinking Skills in English Language Arts Classrooms