Passive Versus Active Learning
Recently, I’ve been attending different tours and open houses for elementary schools in New York. At one of these, a principal shared a philosophy that really resonated with me. When asked about the school’s attitude and philosophy around technology, screen-usage, edtech and AI, he didn’t tiptoe around his opinion at all or cater to what he thought the parents wanted to hear. Instead, he gave a clear answer. The core of teaching and curriculum needs to revolve around active learning – not passive learning. It’s not that any given piece of technology, software, or screen is inherently good or bad. However, it is important to note that at the heart, the user is often engaging in a passive manner. As noted in the documentary, The Social Dilemma, the two notable areas where we even call a group of people “users” are in the world of technology and the world of addiction. And we have all seen children and adults, passively scrolling, passively gaming, passively sitting in a meeting. We have all been that individual! And while there is room for that in our lives and downtime, it should not (and cannot) replace learning.
The moment this principal used that phrase, passive learning versus active learning, synapses began to fire in my brain. As a tutor, I have been feeling, witnessing, experiencing, and hearing about this for a long time amongst my students and their parents with a rapid increase in the last two years and the explosion of AI. There has been a rapid devolution within education, and it goes much beyond the scope of COVID’s impact.
What is the difference between active and passive learning?
You can give a man a bucket of fish or you can teach him to fish. This antiquated, yet apt parable is directly related to passive versus active learning. Teaching someone to fish is slow, arduous, time consuming, requires trial and error, struggle and mistakes, and may, in the end, yield little to no fish at first. But if we raise a generation of children who do not know how to fish, they have lost all agency in this world. They will be reliant on people handing them buckets of fish. They will be reliant on other people or other tools to do it. And they will not have the soft skills to work through problems that are not easily solved for them. They will have no practice or familiarity with struggle, perseverance, discipline, and problem solving if they have outsourced all reasoning and thinking from a young age.
Passive learning is like pouring water through a sieve. On one hand, sure, students are being exposed to topics, ideas, strategies and knowledge. But they are not retaining it. It flows through them and out again. They are living in an age when information is quickly accessible. They are not practiced in retention. They can Google something instantly and retrieve an answer. So while these instantaneous outputs seem useful and efficient, they are doing nothing to support learning, problem solving, critical thinking, or the practice in building an evidenced-based argument.
What does active learning look like?
Active learning can look like a lot of things. In early elementary school, active learning can be found in fort-building, woodworking, discovering how the primary colors work through painting, and imaginative play. Active learning happens when students are given a problem and given space and resources to work out possible solutions and discover. In later elementary, it might look like a cursive class where they take their time to learn and form these new letters, read them, and focus on spelling in detail. It may look like a spelling bee. It may also show in projects where they must create or build something that solves someone else’s problem.
In middle school and high school, active learning shows up a lot in note-taking…in a notebook! Anything that involves students' tactile ability is great. It also means creating study guides, sentence by sentence. I had a 9th grader come to me the other day looking to study for his history in-class essay. When I asked him what study materials he had, he showed me this great study guide! Wow! I admired. Okay great. Let’s dive in and try to answer this prompt, I said. And at that point, he revealed that the study guide was created by AI, and he hadn’t read the textbook at all… so he didn’t know any of the terms or important people or what happened. He didn’t have any of the knowledge yet to start answering the prompt. The study guide was rendered useless. So I asked him, where do you want to start? And he replied, I guess we could read the textbook. And that’s exactly what we did. And before long, he had created his own study guide that might not have looked as pretty as the one generated by AI, but it was thoughtful, thorough, and most importantly filled with knowledge that he had actually learned.
There are no shortcuts to learning. There are many shortcuts these days to type in a prompt and spit out an AI generated study guide or an AI generated grade A paper or speech. But there are no shortcuts to development. No shortcuts to teaching kids how to express themselves in the verbal or written sense. No shortcuts through the collaborative process.
We, as a society, as parents and educators, need to refocus on the process – not the product or output. We need to teach our children to fish. And honestly, the students are craving it.
If passive learning and educational software and screens are so ineffective, why are they everywhere?
We live in a product oriented world. Many of these programs and products are selling a magic bullet in a time when scores are dropping rapidly. And it sounds appealing, in part, because there is a deep need to close these educational gaps in reading and math. COVID had a huge, negative impact on education, but the learning regression was present before and continues today. And now, the problem is that we are so desperate to right the ship, we are throwing buckets and buckets of fish at the students in order to mask the fact that they do not know how to fish. But that will never close the gap. And again, I’ll say, there is no shortcut to creating and fostering critical thinking and problem solving skills. We must slow down. We must be intentional about technology and software in these classrooms designed to “fix” test scores. We must be wary of any “magic bullet.” Because the truth is that much of the technology in our classrooms are either exacerbating the problem or at the very least detracting time and money from real solutions. It all takes time, but in the long run, I cannot wait to have a generation of students at the helm who are resilient, resourceful, collaborative, and above all, brilliant. I know it is possible. I see this journey in my students every year, and it’s my greatest joy.