Melissa Gresalfi, School of Education
Teaching active learning requires active learning: Preparing first-time graduate student instructors for their own classrooms
P251 Psychology for Elementary Majors
Course revision
Support provided by Campus Instructional Consulting
Instructional Goals
- To teach psychological theories as helpful skills, not memorized facts
- To create problem-based learning units
P251 Psychology for Elementary Majors, is a required course that reviews psychological theories of learning and development. It is taught in many small sections led by education graduate students and coordinated by a faculty member. Prof. Gresalfi’s main goal in P251 is to provide students a set of tools they can use to understand and respond to situations in their own classrooms. This goal led to a two-fold challenge: first, Prof. Gresalfi had to re-organize the course around active learning activities that helped students learn about psychological theories in such a way that they become helpful sets of skills, rather than facts memorized for a test. Second, Prof. Gresalfi had to train her graduate student instructors, many of whom were first-time teachers themselves, to teach in a way that promotes active learning, which involves a strong grasp of the material.
Prof. Gresalfi began by restructuring the course, creating six units focused on different dilemmas of teaching practice that learning and developmental theories would address. She broke each dilemma down further into project- and problem-based learning. Each unit begins with a realistic story that shapes the project, which lasts for the duration of the unit and encourages students to synthesize different approaches to the dilemma. The remainder of each unit is problem-based as students use active learning activities to work through how different approaches to learning and development can help the hypothetical teacher in the story. Prof. Gresalfi and her graduate students developed and tested these activities, and are constantly refining them to ensure that they point students toward using the ideas and information presented.
Helping her graduate instructors learn new strategies for this type of teaching is the other part of Prof. Gresalfi’s challenge, and she accomplished this by working closely with them to help craft good questions for class. She also trained them so they were better able to respond to the kinds of questions that result from students’ increased engagement with the material. In this way, Prof. Gresalfi encouraged both graduate instructors and students to see that learning happens in the application of knowledge that activities and discussions require. This benefits graduate students and undergraduates alike, because helping students learn in a different way means that they also learn to teach in a different way.
The changes Prof. Gresalfi introduced to P251 have proven very successful. Once students grew accustomed to the increased activity, interaction, and different kinds of learning and performance expected of them, they rose to the challenge. Prof. Gresalfi and her graduate instructors also came away with a different, enhanced understanding of the material. Planning the activities was time-consuming, and the content covered seemed less than what can be covered in a lecture, but students’ increased understanding and engagement with the material—reflected in their questions and work—made these changes worth the effort.
Prof. Gresalfi continues to refine P251, developing and testing new activities and reviewing older ones. This process demonstrates her belief that active learning and teaching are processes that one must jump into wholeheartedly. Students and instructors need enough time to practice when they learn something new. Instructors, for example, had to help students along with techniques that encouraged greater preparedness and class interaction, but they also had to be firm in a classroom where the responsibility for teaching and learning lies more with the student than many are used to. Prof. Gresalfi found that students and instructors will rise to the challenge when given a vision of what you want them to accomplish. Her reorganization of P251 proved to Prof. Gresalfi that teaching active teaching requires active learning.
—Sarah Marion
