Some background.
When aiming for engaging environments one should seek for students to participate actively and to go beyond handling information, so they perform more significatively.
What is an active path?
It is a carefully constructed route for your course. It gathers your content together into chunks and activities that serve as a roadmap, guiding learners on their learning experience.
Check out some advantages:
- It creates room for connecting theoretical knowledge with situations applied in real life.
- It allows going back to previous thoughts and opinions that can be remodeled, which leads to ending misconceptions and reconsidering previous ideas.
Tips that might help you:
- Consider the overall learning goals: Base your active path designing.
- Stress the importance of self-assessments: Provide spaces to reflect on learning and find out how appropriate your activities are.
- Contemplate the multiple learning styles: Ask your students what might work best for them.
- Offer immediate constructive feedback: Let know them to know students what can be improved and what is properly developed.
Here are some activities you could implement in your classroom, brought by The University of Leicester:
Pair thinking: Pose a question or problem and give students a couple of minutes to think individually about their ideas or answers. Then ask them to pair up with someone to discuss their thinking for a further few minutes.
Self-generated Q’s: Ask students to brainstorm possible exam questions and model answers on a given topic. Evaluation the questions and use them as prompts for discussion
Own words: Ask students to write what they have just learned. You could ask them to direct it to a specific audience
Chain notes: Write one question about the topic on the outside of an envelope. Ask students to pass it around the room and each writes a response and put it in the envelope. Go through the student responses to look for patterns and discuss these with the students.
Roleplaying: a character in a particular situation: encouraging them to solve problems using approaches and skills relevant to that situation.
On the following link you will find useful resources and examples related to active paths and guides: