Active learning strategies for young children

A young child listening to an explanation is doing one thing: listening. A young child sorting objects into groups while explaining why is doing four things at once: handling, deciding, justifying, and remembering. Active learning is not a break from the lesson. It is the lesson, arranged so the child has to do something with the idea before the period ends.

Why it works

Memory is built by retrieval, not by exposure. A child who hears a rule three times may recognise it and still be unable to use it. A child who applies the rule once, gets it wrong, and corrects it has done something exposure cannot replicate. This is why the same twenty minutes can produce very different results depending on who is doing the thinking.

Four strategies that fit a normal period

• Think–pair–share. Ask a question, give thirty seconds of silence, then one minute of talking in pairs before anyone answers aloud. The silence is the part teachers skip and the part that makes it work, because it gives the slower processor a first thought to bring to the pair.
• Sorting and classifying. Hand out cards, pictures, or numbers and ask for groups. Then ask for a different grouping of the same set. The second grouping is where the reasoning shows.
• Teach it back. A child explains the step to a partner who has permission to say "I don't follow." Gaps surface immediately, and they surface to the child rather than to you.
• Quick whiteboards. Every child answers, every answer is visible at once. You learn in five seconds what a raised hand would have hidden for the rest of the lesson.

What to watch for

Activity is not the goal; thinking is. A busy, cheerful task where the child never has to decide anything produces the same result as a lecture, at greater cost. Before running any activity, ask what the child will have to decide. If the answer is "nothing", the activity is decoration.

Starting small

Convert one segment of one lesson. Take the part you usually explain and turn it into a question the class answers before you confirm it. Keep everything else the same for a week and watch what changes in the follow-up questions you get.

Sources

• UNICEF — Education
• American Academy of Pediatrics — HealthyChildren.org