{"id":1298,"date":"2015-11-11T13:06:02","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T18:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2017-02-09T12:10:15","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T17:10:15","slug":"a-shift-to-active-learning-fw15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/2015\/a-shift-to-active-learning-fw15\/","title":{"rendered":"A Shift to Active Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biology instructor Rebecca Benard began adopting new teaching methods as an Active Learning Fellow in 2014-15. Photo by Mike Sands.<\/p><\/div>\n

Rebecca Benard<\/strong> emerges from her office in Millis Hall into a somewhat larger room with a long table and a whiteboard. The space is crammed with first-year students waiting to ask questions. Ordinarily, young people just starting college are shy about seeking help from their teachers. But Benard, an instructor in the biology department, has already built a close relationship with this group. And so, on a sunny September afternoon, a dozen undergraduates are here to sharpen their understanding of the material presented in lectures earlier in the week.<\/p>\n

Such gatherings are a regular occurrence: Benard sets aside an hour each Friday to work with students in her Anatomy and Physiology course. The crowd reminds some of her colleagues of a sit-in, she says. Yet the mood couldn\u2019t be more different.<\/p>\n

Students love Benard. Soon after she joined the Case Western Reserve faculty in 2009, they began nominating her for the Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. They said things like, “She makes anatomy and physiology fun and fulfilling,” and declared their excitement at the “cognitive breakthroughs” they experienced during her office hours. In spring 2015, Benard won the Wittke award.<\/p>\n

Today she stands at the whiteboard sketching the various layers of skin cells with colored markers and discussing their complex interactions. She isn’t so much lecturing as leading. A student asks, \u201cCan we go over keratinization?\u201d \u201cYes,\u201d Benard responds. \u201cBut not I. You.\u201d Through a rapid series of questions, she demonstrates how much students already grasp.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got the stratum basale,\u201d she says as she draws the deepest epidermal layer. \u201cNow what kind of cell should I be drawing next? What shape?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cCuboidal,\u201d a soft voice offers tentatively.<\/p>\n

\u201cCuboidal!\u201d Benard echoes, louder. \u201cYeah! You got these cuboidal-shaped cells! Now, what\u2019s happening in the stratum basale layer?\u201d<\/p>\n

Another soft voice: \u201cMitosis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMitosis! Yes!\u201d<\/p>\n

And on the hour goes, with Benard cheerleading the students through the lesson. Her brown hair is tucked into a topknot that becomes increasingly tousled as the session goes on. No wonder: She stands for minutes with her palms atop her head, elbows jutting. She paces. She points. She declares, \u201cCells are amazing!\u201d In response to a group summary of the material, she calls out, \u201cBeautiful!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"During

During Benard’s office hours, a dozen students from her Anatomy and Physiology class gather outside her door to ask questions. Photo by Mike Sands.<\/p><\/div>\n

But her success as an instructor isn\u2019t born of animation and enthusiasm alone. The true heart of it is close attention to what teaching methods work.<\/p>\n

\u201cMost scientists are not trained to be educators,\u201d says Benard, who earned a doctorate in ecology from the University of California, Davis. \u201cYou\u2019re trained in your specialty and then it\u2019s, \u2018Now go teach,\u2019 and they hand you the book.\u201d She decided to approach teaching the way she would approach any question in science: What does the research say? How can she adapt research-proven methods to her own classroom? How can she test their efficacy?<\/p>\n

Last year, Benard went further still with her deductive, methodical, hypothesis-testing approach as one of Case Western Reserve\u2019s Active Learning Fellows. Since its introduction in 2013, the fellowship program has offered course development funds, technical support and pedagogical guidance to selected faculty members from all parts of the university. The fellows each begin to reconfigure the way they teach by restructuring one class, moving away from the model of the lecturing professor and toward methods that increase students\u2019 opportunities for collaboration, problem solving and critical thinking. The Provost\u2019s office and Information Technology Services sponsor the fellowship program with cooperation from UCITE, the University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education.<\/p>\n

For Benard, the fellowship was part of \u201ca big journey for me personally and professionally to teach students how to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Flipping the Classroom<\/h3>\n

One of the most dramatic ways to introduce active learning is with something called the \u201cflipped classroom.\u201d What\u2019s \u201cflipped\u201d is the tradition of having students listen to lectures in class and do assignments at home. In the flipped classroom, the lecture moves out of the classroom, often as a series of short videos watched online. The assignments\u2014often the toughest part of any class, and the part that\u2019s supposed to put learning to work\u2014are moved into the classroom, where students can solve problems individually or in groups and have immediate access to professors and teaching assistants.<\/p>\n

\"Students

Students in Genevi\u00e8ve Sauv\u00e9\u2019s Physical Chemistry I class solve problems together in small groups in one of the university\u2019s new active learning spaces. Photo by Mike Sands.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cInstead of having students getting frustrated in the dorm room, let\u2019s have them frustrated in an environment where they can work through the problem and get their questions answered,\u201d Benard says. \u201cIf they want a lecture, they can have it, but they can watch it outside of class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Kenney, who served as the Teagle Professorial Fellow and senior instructor in the chemistry department from 2007 to 2012, was an early adopter of active learning at Case Western Reserve. Three years ago he decided to flip a class of 382 students\u2014an unusually large class for this approach.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t easy, given the way lecture halls are designed. \u201cIt\u2019s like teaching in a small stadium,\u201d Kenney says. \u201cYou have seats ramping to the back of the room and nine chalkboards in the front, and you\u2019re the instructor there onstage. It\u2019s not really conducive to an active, collaborative environment.\u201d Students couldn\u2019t easily huddle into small groups, and it wasn\u2019t easy for him to move from group to group. Still, after more than 15 years of teaching general chemistry, Kenney found that the flipped classroom was transformative.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe content was no longer the most important thing,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat was important was taking that information and applying it to solve problems. To prepare students to be able to do that required a different teaching process.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Michael

Michael Kenney (left), assistant director of Academic Technology and Faculty Support, works with faculty members such as physics professor Corbin Covault in the Active Learning Fellows program. Photo by Mike Sands.<\/p><\/div>\n

Kenney is now assistant director of Academic Technology and Faculty Support in Information Technology Services (ITS). In this role, he has put his flipped classroom experience to broader use. ITS has started redesigning classrooms to promote active learning. To date it has created five colorful spaces that have nothing in common with the theater lecture hall. The new rooms, which accommodate 20 to 54 students, include chairs that swivel and roll, movable tables, touch-screen computers with web conferencing ability, enough wireless bandwidth to support five devices per person, writeable walls and whiteboards, and LED lighting. Faculty members can \u201cpush\u201d content from their computers to screens mounted near students\u2019 collaborative work stations, or pods, around the room.<\/p>\n

One goal of the Active Learning Fellowships is to show faculty members how to take full advantage of the new spaces. A survey of students from active learning classes taught by the 12 fellows in the program\u2019s first year showed that almost all students found active learning valuable, saying it had a positive impact on their learning and their enthusiasm. Seventy of the 96 students who responded said they thought the active learning approach was the best way to teach the course they took.<\/p>\n

During her year as a fellow, Benard flipped her 200-level Development and Physiology class, which normally meets twice a week. Because the class was too large for any of the active learning spaces, Benard innovated by splitting the group in two, with half the students attending an interactive lesson on one day, and the other half attending the next. \u201cTo my knowledge, no one in the College of Arts and Sciences had this kind of course design before,\u201d Benard says. \u201cThe whole approval process took about six months.\u201d<\/p>\n

Implementing the course required a lot of work. Benard created 10\u201312 six-minute videos for each unit and asked students to watch them on their own. Class time was devoted to case-study problems. In one lesson, students used what they had learned about organ systems and immune response to figure out what happens when a patient receives a blood transfusion from an incompatible donor. The students worked through each step of the body\u2019s reaction, from the action of antibodies to organ failure. \u201cSo many students are so insightful,\u201d Benard says. \u201cIt\u2019s just crazy for me that they can make the leaps that they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

After that first flipped semester last spring, Benard surveyed her students. Eighty-five percent said the class should be taught this way again. \u201cAs an educator, it was the best semester I\u2019ve ever had, hands down,\u201d she says. \u201cI can\u2019t go back. I just can\u2019t go back. I cannot do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deeper Learning<\/h3>\n

Associate Professor Genevi\u00e8ve Sauv\u00e9<\/strong>, who\u2019s in her seventh year as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry, was an Active Learning Fellow at the same time as Benard. She grew interested in the idea when she realized that students in her physical chemistry class rarely understood the material in a useful way. \u201cThey were just memorizing and plugging numbers into formulas,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"This

This fall, Genevi\u00e8ve Sauv\u00e9 taught Physical Chemistry I in one of the university’s new active learning classrooms. Photo by Mike Sands.<\/p><\/div>\n

So, last fall Sauv\u00e9 flipped the class. \u201cThe first semester was awful!\u201d she acknowledges. \u201cI was constantly in a race to create all these videos and convert all my homeworks into class activities. It was not a fun time.\u201d But the results convinced her. \u201cAt the end of the semester, this class performed better than students had in previous years. I had fewer C students and more A students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corbin Covault,<\/strong> a current Active Learning Fellow, avoided the madness of flipping an entire course at one time. A professor in the Department of Physics, Covault has been teaching for 20 years, 14 of them at Case Western Reserve. In his introductory physics class, he has 300 students each term. This fall, Covault selected ideas from the active learning approach and found places for them in a more traditional classroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, I would introduce all the new material in lecture, having assumed that most of the students didn\u2019t do the assigned readings,\u201d Covault says. \u201cThis year, I developed a series of key lecture videos I ask them to watch. They get points for completing regular lecture assignments.\u201d By making this shift, Covault has secured 10 to 20 minutes of class time each session that his students devote to problem-solving activities.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy hope is that it will take students from seeing the material as a large collection of facts and ideas they have to know, to seeing how they are interrelated\u2014to go from superficial learning to deeper learning,\u201d Covault says. \u201cThat\u2019s the focus of the activities, and so far, they seem to be pretty successful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Covault was already devoted to finding the best teaching methods before he became an Active Learning Fellow. Benard was as well. Still, she says that the fellowship has had a profound impact. \u201cIt helped me refine my goals,\u201d she explains. \u201cMost important, I have this community of other people in the university doing the same thing. We can bounce ideas off each other. I\u2019m still learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jenni Laidman is a freelance writer in Louisville, Ky. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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