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STUDENTS
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Editorial/Our View
Teaching in Active Voice
The university’s Quality Enhancement Plan presents some interesting
ideas
The progressive decisions the university outlined in its Quality Enhancement
Plan helped it reaffirm its accreditation from the Southern Association
of Colleges and Schools last week.
The summary of the plan itself is difficult to hack through. It reads
a bit like a post-modernist, first-person account of conceiving good ideas.
The summary states that the plan’s goal is “the effective
application of active learning to achieve higher-order thinking skills.”
The phrase “active learning” has frequently been pushed on
professors and advisers this semester and has met varied responses. Perhaps
the most common is “As opposed to what — passive learning?”
Well, yes.
Passive learning, according to some administrators, refers to classes
in which professors lecture to students, and students take notes. Students
in these classes are usually silent, with the exception of foreign-language
classes, when they are frequently asked to recite back to the professor.
One need only spend a single day in a Spanish I class to see how this
method barely surpasses passive learning.
The plan, outlined by the university and presented to the SACS committee,
is exciting because it proposes the formation and redesign of twelve classes
across the campus that are essentially pilot projects for observing different
learning techniques. The School of Business will offer an Introduction
to Operations Management course in which lectures will be supplemented
by a group project requiring students to build or buy their own catapult.
The College of Liberal Arts and the UTA Library have redesigned critical
thinking, reading and writing classes so that students emerge with a clear
idea of what plagiarism consists of and the university’s guidelines
regarding plagiarism. The School of Architecture has designed a class
requiring students to develop an interactive digital portfolio.
The exciting thing about the university promoting “active learning”
is the initiative it innately asks students and professors to take on.
It could be something as simple as rearranging an English classroom’s
desks into a circle to facilitate group discussion, or as complex as organizing
the OneBook discussions.
Perhaps the only negative thing that can be said about the plan is that
its rhetoric might antagonize some of the more active professors on campus.
EDITORIAL ROUNDUP
The issue:
Part of the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan is
the formation and redesign of twelve classes that promote active learning.
We suggest:
The plan is a good idea that will serve the university several
long-term benfets.
CORRECTIONS
The story should have stated that the university would not
receive reaffirmation of accreditation until December. The university’s
accreditation status was misidentified in the editorial.
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