DALC Champion Chris Roderick
- Tell me about your experience with DALC. What has been the best part?
Community. (Yes, it’s right there in the name.)
Only a very small number of us has any formal training in how to teach. But the community facilitates something akin to crowd-sourcing of experience gained through experimentation. With dozens of practitioners exploring alternatives, the group discussions (collectively analyzing proposed activities, reflecting upon in-class experiences, learning of and developing new methods) has allowed each us to evolve and push forward very quickly.
- How do you think active learning pedagogy enriches the learning experience?
An almost continuous set of opportunities for student-teacher interaction are built right into the “classtime”. It contracts the feedback loop to an immediate experience. Misconceptions are exposed in realtime as the students work through the activities, and can be addressed immediately while the student is (cognitively) still embedded inside the process of sense-making.
- How has adopting an active learning approach informed your practice?
It has made me acutely aware of the role of the student in their own learning, and the limitations of what I can provide. (This is to be understood in contrast to where I began, as a pedagogue, with “chalk-and-talk” in which, implicitly, the student was to follow me to a destination along a path of my design.) Knowledge can be transferred from the teacher and passively received by the student. But learning must be constructed by the student within their own mind – it cannot be transferred – and the teacher can help guide their process. The Active Learning Classrooms are venues spatially organized to assist in the guidance process; and the Activities are structured to (hopefully!) assist in the student’s understanding construction process.
