Novigado invited different stakeholders to respond to the two questions: How should active learning look like in a school? What would you recommend to teachers? Here, Adil Tugyan, the EFL Teacher, a Teacher Trainer and an eLearning and Educational Technology expert in Turkey, shares his insights and perspective on how active learning should look like in schools.

“I used to think it was good teaching to stand in front of a class and lecture and have students quietly doing work alone at their desks, but I don’t think that anymore. A great classroom is a place where students are doing as much of the talking and thinking and problem solving as the teacher. It’s a place where students are tackling questions and problems that are relevant to their daily lives. This kind of classroom helps prepare students to be thinkers—and that is the most important skill a teacher can teach.”

These are Adil’s words on the importance of using active learning in classrooms. Through active learning, students learn by taking ownership of their learning process, thus becoming more independent thinkers and problem solvers. To achieve this result, teachers need proven strategies, support structures, and the right kind of classroom environment. Therefore, he gives some recommendations on the implementation of active learning pedagogy at schools. Using student-led inquiry technique, classroom discussions and debates, having students create and compose original works, collaborative group tasks, and project-based learning activities are among the methods and techniques for enhancing active learning.

He also shares experiences and strategies he uses in the school with their colleagues which exemplify how active learning should look like in a school. He speaks of the Skill Lab they use for students to create and compose digital artifacts in their project-based activities, as well as improving their digital competences after school time. Moreover, their school works in collaboration with a local university to upskill the teachers for organizing lessons based on real-life problems.

He touches on the influence of the classroom design for creating an active learning environment. Emphasizing that the different kinds of learning activities require different arrangement in the physical space, he recommends varying the arrangement of the desks and classroom learning materials for different activities to foster active learning, rather than traditional row of desks, which implies passively listening and observing. He believes that having reconfigurable furniture enabling teachers and students to move freely around the room is important for supporting various learning styles and activities. Large circles and U Shapes, and the desks or tables arranged in small groups convey the importance of collaboration in learning.

For the teachers, Adil emphasizes the difficulty of the transition phase from lecturing to active learning. Getting out of their comfort zone by giving up some degree of control over the classroom and allowing students to have more agency on their learning might be challenging for some teachers. Therefore, a successful transition entails taking teachers’ affective needs into consideration as well. He advises some practical strategies and simple active learning exercises for the teachers to make the shift to active learning pedagogy relatively easily. Assessing the needs of the students before designing learning and teaching activities and evaluating the course planning in advance for any bottlenecks or challenges might help in overcoming the difficulties in this process.

In sum, he provides a good framework and useful tips for building the courses around the active learning pedagogy. If you are interested in the details of how active learning can be implemented effectively in schools, read the full article by Adil Tuğyan here.