L517: Advanced Study of the Teaching of Secondary School Reading

ACTIVE LEARNING

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Active Learning in Language-Based Classrooms

Being an active means a lot for a reader/a learner. It means not waiting for learning to happen, but making it happen. It means preparing well with schema and strategies beforehand and expecting a challenging experience of increasing knowledge. It means conscious or unconscious interests and effort in approaching personal goals. And it also means being sensitive to the key and important points and enjoying the gradual and tentative process of learning… In the context of content area learning in language-based classrooms, there are five theoretical principles which characterize active learners:

Principle 1: Active Learners Use Their Prior knowledge in the Meaning-Making  Process

Active learners know that what they take from a text depends on how much they bring to it. What learners already know, their prior knowledge, and what they want to know will affect the ease and difficulty of their meaning making or understanding and their subsequent learning. They are trying to approach the match between their prior knowledge and text materials. When the match occurs, schema functions in at least three ways. First, schema provides a framework for learning that allow readers to seek and select information that is relevant to their purposes for reading. Second, schema helps readers organize text information. Third, schema helps readers elaborate information.

Principle 2: Active Learners Understand and Use Text Structure to Organize Their Meaning Making

Text Structure is the discernible organizational patterns of narrative and expository texts. Active learners are familiar with these patterns and they use their knowledge of these patterns to improve their comprehension. Besides the logical relationships in expository text mentioned in the textbook, the following organizational relationships are grouped based on different content areas.

Patterns in Social Studies:

Patterns in Science

Patterns in Mathematics

Active learners can use many types of clues or signals to identify a text’s global structure.

Principle 3: Active Learners Think Critically about Text and Create Their own Elaborations

Active learners are self-directed. They think carefully. Thinking is a complex activity involving the brain’s neurons (nerve cells) linking with other neurons as waves of impulses travel from neuron to neuron. Numerous skills comprise the act of thinking. These skills can be grouped into two categories: creative and critical.

Active learners use both critical and creative thinking. They use critical thinking to define the problem and use creative thinking to solve it. They are honest with themselves, can resist manipulations, ask good questions and look for connections between subjects.

Principle 4: Active Learners Are Metacognitively Aware

Matacognition is the “knowledge and control we have over thinking and learning activities”, involving three aspects: self-monitoring, task knowledge and self-knowledge.

Self-monitoring: monitoring their own reading or listening to detect error or contradictions in a text, identify topics or ideas they do not understand, and use a variety of task-appropriate reading and learning strategies to fix up or alleviate their difficulties in understanding. Many students do not monitor their understanding.

Task knowledge includes the products (e.g., tests, papers, classroom discussions, projects, experiments and demonstrations) that teachers require of students and the thinking processes involved in completing the products. Self-knowledge refers to students’ understanding of themselves as readers and learners, e.g., the awareness of their motivations, beliefs, and strengths as they read, listen, and think about ideas.

Principle 5: Active Learners Possess and Employ a Wide Range of Reading and Learning Strategies

Active learners have a repertoire of strategies and know when to select the most appropriate ones for the subject area and for the task described by the teachers. To approach this goal, active learners must have three different kinds of strategy knowledge: declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge. In addition, students must know where, how, and why they should use these strategies.

Active Learning Can be Trained!!

Teachers Can

References:

Brozo, W. G. & Simpson, M. L. (1999). Readers, Teachers, Learners: Expanding

     Literacy Across the Content Areas, 3^rd Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-

     Hall, Inc.

Vacca, R.T. & Vacca, J. A. (2002). Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across

     The Curriculum, 7^th Edition. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

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