Helping Students Become Active Learners

by Mark Gillingham

Many good classrooms feature students engaged in group activities, but what makes one type of activity more beneficial than another? James Paul Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, is concerned that many of the participants in these activities are ultimately inactive participants. Gee, who has written a lot about the importance of interactive learning environments, recently posted on his blog about the fallacy of “mindless progressivism,” the belief that participation in any form results in real student learning. Immersion in an interest-driven group is not enough, he says, to teach children the skills they need. He writes:

Learning to produce the knowledge or outcomes an interest-driven group is devoted to leads to higher-order and meta-level thinking skills. If only a few are producers and most are consumers, then a group is divided into a small number of “priests” (insiders with “special” knowledge and skills) and the “laity” (followers who use language, knowledge, and tools they do not understand deeply and cannot transform for specific contexts of use).

Gee calls for a pedagogy that helps learners become producers of their own learning, and he places special emphasis on well-designed learning environments that give all group members avenues for participation. Although as a learning environment it takes place on a much smaller scale, Great Books Shared Inquiry^TM discussion fits his description in many ways. In Shared Inquiry, readers ask questions in a systematic manner that promotes deeper reading, thoughtful discussion, listening, and other aspects of critical thinking.

Shared Inquiry makes learners into knowledge producers in every lesson. All students have access to multiple entry levels because contributions to the discussion can take many forms—everything from straightforward answers to the main question to new, related questions for the group to discuss. Collaboration is driven by a shared interest in the featured story. Participation begins long before a student asks her first question or offers his first bit of evidence. Listening is a key ingredient of Shared Inquiry—first to the story (a first reading is almost always done aloud), and then to peers. The ability to respond directly to other students and cross-apply textual evidence to different interpretations is essential for successful participation, so all students are encouraged to become active producers of knowledge.

In Shared Inquiry discussion, students are practicing critical thinking skills that will serve them for the rest of their lives: weighing evidence, articulating arguments, and considering multiple perspectives as they formulate their own opinions. Gee’s summary of the ultimate aim of education could easily be read as the goal of Shared Inquiry:

All learners are well prepared to be active, thoughtful, engaged members of the public sphere (this is the ultimate purpose of “public” education), which means an allegiance to argument and evidence over ideology and force and the ability to take and engage with multiple perspectives based on people’s diverse life experiences defined not just in terms of race, class, and gender, but also in terms of the myriad of differences that constitutes the uniqueness of each person and the multitude of different social and cultural allegiances all of us have.

Mark Gillingham is vice president of technology at the the Great Books Foundation. He works to develop ways to use technology, information, and research to forward the mission of the Foundation.

Memories of Great Books PART II

by Lee Pilgrim

(This is the second part of  Lee Pilgrim's memories of her Great Books experiences.)

As an adult I taught in public schools in gifted programs and developed curriculum for gifted learners. Great Books was a staple of the curriculum for gifted readers in the systems in which I taught, so I never had to go to bat for it. I was grateful for the materials and respect that the program had in those systems among administrators and teachers of the gifted. I always felt that the program should have been used for all students—to teach critical thinking, introduce readers to authentic literature, and help them read for comprehension.

My gifted students loved labeling questions. They would joyfully call out, "Literal—right there, in the text!" or "Evaluative—needs my experience or opinion!" and most importantly, once they had a label and some experience they could easily identify good interpretive questions on their own and lead discussion groups. I was a stickler for keeping to interpretive questions in our discussions, and students knew this.

This was my goal in the classroom. I wanted my students to be able not only to participate in Shared Inquiry, but to lead their peers in a meaningful analysis of a text. This would only be possible if students had verbal "handles" for their thought processes, so we spent an enormous amount of time at the start focusing on the process as well as the literature.

As much current research on learning and the brain has shown, language scaffolds learning and thought. I believe that the language of Shared Inquiry gives students strategies and a framework for discussing and analyzing a text with others. It also gives them labels for their text-related thought processes and, thus, metacognitive tools for reflecting on how they approach and comprehend what they read.

Several years ago, I moved back to Atlanta after forty years in another city. I began to attend my mother's Great Books group meetings at the Buckhead Ida Williams library. They have a strong group with a core of about eleven readers and an additional six to eight who weave in and out of the group throughout the year. The group is primarily female and at least half of them are in their eighties. This is my first time participating in an adult Great Books group, and it has been delightful. Discussions are lively and pertinent and reflect the enormous intellect and experience of the readers. This group, for instance, has often reread an entire series of books a decade after first reading and discussing it, bringing new interpretations and experience to the table.

Lee Pilgrim taught in public schools in Georgia at the elementary and middle school level in the regular and gifted resource classroom. Her experience includes assessment and evaluation for placement, program coordination, and curriculum writing for gifted programs. She has worked with the Future Problem Solving Program (FPSPI) at the state and international level for more than fifteen years as an evaluator, program director, and trainer.