Active Learning: Revisiting the Shift, Part 1

Students collaborate to interpret percents using bar diagrams.

I have always deeply believed in making room for students to think aloud, wonder, play with ideas, scrap ideas, and begin again, but I have not always been sure of how to do that with my math classes. 

Thanks to a persistent spirit and the desire to know more so I could do more, I have engaged in as many math professional learning opportunities as possible. While the start of my journey is a topic for another day, taking advantage of those opportunities led me to writing an article for Edutopia in 2022 about how to facilitate rich mathematical learning when I was still a classroom teacher. 

I wrote about three teacher moves that promote active learning in the math classroom. 

I’ll present excerpts of the moves here, each in a different blog post, to respect your reading time and to encourage you to ponder over each move separately. Let me know if you use any of the moves already in your current instructional practices or if one speaks to you and you’re interested in trying it. 

Move #1. Dim your light: After an online graduate school experience during which my classmates and I spoke for nearly 90 percent of the class, I had an epiphany. I was learning so much by talking about, questioning, exploring, failing, and experimenting with the math tasks I was assigned that I longed to re-create an experience like that for my students.

What I had to reckon with was shifting my role from teacher to facilitator. What did that look like? How would my students learn if I didn’t tell them everything? I had to become comfortable with presenting tasks in a way that would require and encourage my students to explore them and extract the mathematical ideas for themselves.

The tasks had to generate thinking through analytical questioning and comprehension activities, and they needed to align with NCTM’s Standards for Mathematical Practice. Because discourse between the learners is a recurring theme throughout the standards, I knew I had to limit the amount of time that I spoke in class and create opportunities for the students to speak, think, debate, question, and justify regularly.

This shift eventually caused the students to leave class discussing the topic of the lesson, rather than grumbling over note-taking or inquiring about which part of the lesson would be on the next quiz. Dimming the light on my ego brightened the opportunity for my students to become active participants in their learning.