Building Broad Minds: Active learning strategies for large classrooms

Building broad minds is not about back filling. Broad minds are the byproduct of encountering diverse ideas, thinking deeply about them, and integrating those ideas into our own worldviews and cognitive frameworks.

In higher education, the opportunity to be exposed to the thinking of a wide variety of disciplines usually happens at the first-year level. However, those are also often large courses where the primary method of instruction is listening to your professor speak. To broaden minds, our learning activities must be active, even in large classrooms where active learning strategies are limited by the room and when students are first encountering the subject matter.

A great simple rule for broad minds is the 10:2 ratio. It basically means that for every 10 minutes of lecture, a student needs 2 minutes of social processing to make sense of it. Most often, we think group work in classes is all about assignments. Actually, it is much more about helping us make sense of what we are learning. Offering students the opportunity to actively participate in their learning in a social learning space has been shown to enhance student engagement and promote both comprehension and memory.  

To encourage broad thinking, consider pausing at least every 10 minutes and doing a short activity that allows students to make sense of what you’ve just tried to teach them.

Use daily active collaboration to increase understanding

• Have students problem-solve in pairs.
• Have students turn and talk to each other about the implications of a new idea introduced, or why it matters.
• Provide opportunities for students to try something and get feedback from a peer. You don’t have time to provide all that feedback in a large class, but feedback is helpful in both improving and remembering, and there are many other people in the room who can help. Giving feedback also refines understanding, so your students are also learning when giving and receiving feedback. 
• Have students teach each other something quick (not a big group presentation). Read more from the research about why this is one of the best ways to improve student understanding (Topping and Stewart, 1998). 

Have students engage in critical thinking and think from multiple worldviews 

Developing broad minds requires encountering the major debates of the discipline early and considering them from multiple perspectives.  Although it is hard to have teams of two students debate other teams of two students in a large lecture theater, all students can think and speak simultaneously.  

See how it works when you:

• Use structured controversies. Watch this video of Marcel D’Eon (USask Emeritus Professor) lead a structure controversy in his classroom and hear what students had to say. 

• Use problem-based learning. Introduce students to real-life scenarios where they will need to apply what your course teaches and have them think actively through key concepts and skills they will need to learn. Learn more about why and how to. 

Additional information and resources:

• Read about simple ways to make learning more active.
• Not sure what you believe about learning? Read this summary of major educational theory and decide what you’d like to read more about.

^{Title image credit: Image by SplitShire from Pixabay}

This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.