1. Engaging & Supporting Diverse Learners: Making Learning Active
Dr. Bruce Taylor
Director, The Center for Adolescent Literacies
September 26, 2011

2. Our Agenda for Tonight Quick question Active vs. Passive Learning
Teaching & learning tools that make learning active
Questions

3. Quick Question
When teaching in your classroom, do you find yourself wishing you could wake up the students and get them more excited in learning?
Let’s talk about this for a couple minutes.
What can we do about this?

4. Active vs. Passive Learning
"Learning by Doing" or "Active Learning" means engaging all of our senses and attention into discovering something new.
When children listen to teachers lecturing or when they watch TV, we call this "passive learning."

5. Active vs. Passive Learning
Active Learning
"traditional class": lecturing instructor verbalizing information to passive note-taking students
instructor is "verbal" textbook
student is an "empty" vessel to be filled with knowledge
on exams, students regurgitate what the instructor tells them
the instructor models activities that students implement in class
visual aids, demonstrations, etc., integrated into class presentations
Students talk, discuss, present, enact, create

7. Putting These Into Practice
Let’s try some of these:
ThinkPairShare with word problems (math)
Fishbowl & Ticket to Talk with Civil Rights (social studies)
3-2-1 and Vocabulary Cards with global warming (science)

8. E) Not enough information is given to answer this question1 2 3 4 5 A B C D E
Looking at the figure above, if triangle ABC is an equilateral triangle and line BC is parallel to line DE, what is the measure of angle 5?
A) 60 degrees
B) 90 degrees
C) 120 degrees
D) 180 degrees
E) Not enough information is given to answer this question
Use ThinkPairShare to solve this problem.

9. Questions???