On Active Learning

While I began having students work in small groups because it made sense to me, I find confirming ideas in recent findings from cognitive scientists about how people learn.  Actually, there’s a book by that name:  How People LearnMore recently, Make It Stick came out in 2014.   The authors make a convincing case that if learning feels easy, it’s probably not deep or lasting, and that we really do learn by working at challenging problems and making mistakes along the way.

If you’d like to learn more about active learning in mathematics, you could start with a series of blog posts that four colleagues and I wrote last fall.