Keep It as Simple as Possible and Don’t Talk so Much

I was reminded again today of one of the more personally difficult aspects of active learning. After a few brief announcements and instructions about today’s activity, my students, as usual, got to work and admirably met my expectations, which apart from walking about and monitoring progress, left me with little to do. I had already assigned my composition students to bring their working theses for the major paper into class today, and I had prepared a set of questions to guide them in evaluating each other’s thesis. Their other instructions were for each of the four groups to choose two representative theses and write them on the glass boards so that we as a class could use the set of questions to evaluate them.

We simply used a page of six questions and some markers on a glass board and made a class of it. On the one hand, this simplicity made the activity easy to explain and set up and made the activity very clear and purposeful. On the other hand, the old soul nestled in my bosom, who apparently was educated by Thomas Arnold at Rugby, felt guilty that I wasn’t extemporizing on the virtues of arguable theses and specificity with the proper moral force and volume. But I heard them asking each other their questions and I saw several adjusting their theses and everyone seemed focused on the task, which I cannot always claim about my longer explanations and board diagrams. And they made good suggestions about improvements to several of the student theses we examined as a class. In short, my classroom speeches may convince me I’m teaching, but my measured listening shows me that they’re learning.