Actively Learning to Teach: meeting student resistance to learning with resilience

The interview with Michael Ungar (Bethune 2019) and Ungar's Globe and Mail article (2019) have made me rethink this issue of resistance to active learning by students. It is interesting what our 2019 Faculty Learning Community stumbled across in our exploration of this issue - that it is a chicken-egg issue, a cycle in which students need to be resilient to engage in active learning yet active learning promotes the development of student resilience. However, we have been thinking of this in terms of resilience being an internal issue. We have been assuming that resilience is a capacity or skill or attribute that can be developed within students. But what Ungar has got me thinking about now is that the ability to be resilient is also a matter of social network and institutional systems. Ungar's work has found that people are more resilient when there are support measures in place for people under stress. These could be some sort of welfare policies and structures or they could be the network of family and friends. Actually, it is not either-or, it is both, Resilience is fostered in people when they have a solid social network (friends and family) and when their community has structures and systems in place to ensure that people are taken care of in times of crisis. Ungar's work cites a number of these social structures such as ensuring that people are able to access insurance and welfare benefits quickly when needed or that there are systems in place to ensure that people have food and shelter when they become unsheltered. The idea that resilience is completely an internal quality is false. I don't think, however, that it is a dualistic situation. I do think that there is an internal aspect of resilience. People may have better resilience developed than others. But what is interesting from Ungar's work is that for most people it seems that social systems play a greater role in producing resilient people than relying solely on internal capability.

So what does this have to with students' resistance to learning?

It has got me thinking that if we as educators wish to promote resilience in our students such that they are able to engage in active learning then we also need to consider our classroom policies and course structures we have implemented. My question is, what sort of classroom policies and course structures will develop students' resilience? Well, a good place to start, I think is to consider the AAC&U's high impact practices. Which one of them will develop social structures in our courses? First-year seminars I think make sense. Also, learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, and service-learning. Why these five of the 11? I think these five will promote students' resilience because they are all structured to develop relationships among learners, between students and teachers, and between learners and their community.

I also think that active learning itself, when properly structured can promote resilience because learning activities that promote social interaction among students will develop their resilience based on Ungar's research. I think this is why team-based learning (TBL) can be such a powerful active learning instructional strategy: the stable teams established at the beginning of the term develop into a learning community as a result of students working together on the two-stage tests and on the in-class applications of learning. Think-pair-share does the same thing by getting students to interact with each other; portions of the class become a transient community. Personal response systems (PRS), such as clickers, can do the same provided that there is a sharing among students after their initial response. PRSs used properly end up being a kind of two-stage exam that fosters student interaction.

However, active learning can explicitly develop resilience or it may not, depending upon how it is implemented. If it is just think-pair-share or personal response systems which include peer discussion, it may or may not develop resilience in students because it is dependent upon whether or not students develop relationships with the students with whom they interact. This will only occur if students interact consistently with the same students. If it is a class of 500, students may not interact with the same students on an ongoing basis if they are always changing where they sit. If on the other hand students are creatures of habit (and I would argue that the vast majority are) then they will likely sit in the same seat and get to know their neighbours. The nice thing about TBL is it explicitly facilitates this relationship-building in its educational system by forming stable teams at the beginning of a course.

I think this is key. If they have a learning community, they may be more willing to take risks in learning and not be devasted by the occasional low-stakes failure. As a result, learning will be more robust with active learning as a result of interleaved retrieval practice which we know enhances learning.