Reliable Formats of Engagement

The Active Learn­ing Class­room is dri­ven by stu­dents doing their own think­ing in sit­u­a­tions you have designed, so you (the res­i­dent expert) can respond and offer feed­back. For many fac­ul­ty mem­bers, the hard­est chal­lenge is to design the kind of activ­i­ty that:

1. is engag­ing and inher­ent­ly inter­est­ing and
2. demon­strates the tar­get­ed think­ing, so it becomes vis­i­ble to the fac­ul­ty mem­ber (and to the stu­dents, them­selves).

One effec­tive strat­e­gy for cre­at­ing intrin­si­cal­ly inter­est­ing tasks is to require stu­dents to make autonomous choic­es and deci­sions with­in a restrict­ed frame­work, rather than gen­er­ate free respons­es to open-end­ed ques­tions. This is the same tech­nique used by game design­ers to make game sce­nar­ios so excit­ing and engag­ing. Restrict­ed autonomous deci­sions empha­size the student’s clear com­mit­ment to a way of think­ing, which impli­cates him/her more direct­ly in the chal­lenge. This in turn caus­es the feed­back to be inter­est­ing, even if the stu­dent is work­ing with­in a top­ic where he/she has no real inter­est. By mak­ing his own, clear choice, the stu­dent has now invest­ed in the chal­lenge, which makes the out­come rel­e­vant at a per­son­al lev­el. Now the stu­dent is moti­vat­ed to learn whether his/her deci­sion is sound, which makes the dis­cus­sion about the deci­sion par­tic­u­lar­ly engag­ing.

Tasks that are open-for­mat (make a list; brain­storm rea­sons; gen­er­ate a solu­tion; “dis­cuss;” etc.) all have their place at times, but they can also lead to lazy think­ing if you are try­ing to pro­mote focused, ana­lyt­i­cal dis­cus­sions in class. For one, the respons­es to an open-for­mat ques­tion can be so far afield as to not be high­ly use­ful in a gen­er­al debrief of stu­dent think­ing. Sec­ond, open-for­mat tasks tend to allow cer­tain kinds of stu­dents to dom­i­nate the con­ver­sa­tion, because they are less timid to gen­er­ate and share their per­spec­tive, even if it is not par­tic­u­lar­ly insight­ful. Also, it’s too easy for less con­fi­dent, less assertive or less quick-think­ing stu­dents to defer to the “best” student’s answer. Closed-for­mat ques­tions tend to lev­el the play­ing field, as slow­er stu­dents are usu­al­ly quick­er to choose than to gen­er­ate an answer.

Debriefing

The ben­e­fit of these restric­tive for­mat tasks is that an instructor’s fol­low-up ques­tion to stu­dents, “WHY?” is now clear­ly focused and deeply ana­lyt­i­cal. “Why did you score this para­graph a 7 and not a 3?” Why did you choose that rock, and not the oth­ers? Why did you put this object in that cat­e­go­ry, rather than this oth­er cat­e­go­ry? “Why” when it fol­lows a student’s own, autonomous deci­sion impli­cates s the stu­dent direct­ly, mak­ing the answer some­thing that mat­ters, because it is per­son­al and imme­di­ate to his own think­ing.