Active Learning for First-time Teachers (part 3)

While I concede the effectiveness of active learning as a strategy for acquainting new teachers with their new profession, especially when they must teach in areas that may not be their specialty, I wonder if others might see this as an indication that pre-arranged lesson plans could be used, then, to send anybody into any classroom to teach. Obviously I think this would be an exceptionally poor idea, but there is some potential for abuse there. I just don’t see that as a likely abuse. However, it also raises a question that has been bothering me for a long while. I was able to gradually adjust to the pedagogy of active learning—the flipped classroom, the collaborative work, and now the reflective element—but I had fifteen years of university teaching before I began this transition, and, therefore, I had a store of field-specific information and classroom experience as a foundation on which to build new strategies. Had I started out with active learning would I have been as confident or as effective or would I have been able to learn as much about the subjects I taught through the very practice of teaching itself?

I know that, among other things, the years of class preparation, of gradually expanding my reading lists, of returning to previously taught material have reinforced and widened my knowledge of my specialized fields, and I am not sure whether the same years of teaching in an active learning environment would have left me less, equally, or more able a teacher than I am with my background in traditional classroom methods. In other words, active learning for first time teachers may allow them more space to work on their skills as teachers, but will it afford them the same opportunities to build their expertise, and thus their confidence, in their field? After all, the more comprehensive the knowledge of one’s field, the more likely that person could respond well to unexpected questions, intriguing digressions, and new thoughts. If, indeed, active learning is to become the dominant model of teaching, then we likely will have to attend equally and explicitly to ways of continually broadening and deepening the specialized knowledge of those teachers.