{"id":541,"date":"2022-08-19T16:44:19","date_gmt":"2022-08-19T20:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/?p=541"},"modified":"2022-08-19T16:44:26","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T20:44:26","slug":"help-your-students-move-beyond-passive-listening-by-beckie-supiano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/teaching\/help-your-students-move-beyond-passive-listening-by-beckie-supiano\/","title":{"rendered":"Help Your Students Move Beyond Passive Listening by Beckie Supiano"},"content":{"rendered":"
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From the Teaching Newsletter<\/a> (Chronicle of Higher Education)<\/h2>\n

August 18, 2022<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s Move<\/h2>\n

Susan Hrach has long enjoyed offering students a variety of activities in class and encouraging them to move around the room. Those practices made class interesting and fun. It was only when she was researching her recent book,\u00a0Minding Bodies<\/i>:\u00a0How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning<\/i><\/a>, that she really thought about\u00a0why\u00a0<\/i>those strategies are effective, she told me in a recent interview. Our brains respond to novelty and social cues; our blood circulation keeps us alert. As Hrach, director of the faculty center and a professor of English at Columbus State University, in Georgia, puts it in her book, \u201cknowledge is constructed through embodied experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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As Hrach\u00a0has shared in this newsletter before<\/a>, the pandemic\u2019s emergency remote instruction made that mind-body connection more salient for many professors. How might they put it into practice in this new semester?<\/p>\n

Hrach says it\u2019s helpful to scope out the space where you\u2019ll be teaching before class begins. \u201cGet familiar with your space,\u201d she says, \u201cand what options are open to you.\u201d Many classrooms are designed for the kind of passive listening Hrach\u2019s work discourages. Lots of instructors have made a habit of pushing against this \u2014 one common practice is to move the chairs into a circle in a smaller room. Another idea, Hrach says, is to request oversize sticky notes to use in place of whiteboards, if a room isn\u2019t already equipped with them.<\/p>\n

Hrach then asks herself before each class period: \u201cHow could we encounter this material in a way that would make us get up and move?\u201d That helps spark the variety of classroom experiences she knows promotes learning.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t have to be elaborate. Students can move to different stations, do a classroom gallery walk, or even just get up and take their handout to a group across the room instead of passing it around. Simply moving about the room helps students feel as if they belong there, Hrach says, and helps them feel connected to their classmates.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also important, Hrach notes, to explicitly tell students that you\u2019ll be expecting them to move around \u2014 and why. The idea that a college class means sitting down and listening to a lecture is deeply ingrained. Students might resist doing something different, and offering them an evidence-based explanation would go a long way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt might be a pleasurable experience for you to sit there and let my words wash over you,\u201d Hrach says. But actually learning the material takes effort \u2014 the student\u2019s effort. It\u2019s better to do some of that work in class time, she adds, than to struggle through it alone afterward.<\/p>\n

There are so many forms that moving around during a class might take. To help professors think through those options, Hrach will be working on an embodied-learning tool kit, one of the projects she\u2019s undertaking during a\u00a0Fulbright research year<\/u><\/a>\u00a0at Carleton University, in Canada. She welcomes questions and ideas from our readers: You can write to her at\u00a0hrach_susan@columbusstate.edu<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Minding<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Teaching Newsletter (Chronicle of Higher Education) August 18, 2022 Let\u2019s Move Susan Hrach has long enjoyed offering students a variety of activities in class and encouraging them to move around the room. Those practices made class interesting and fun. It was only when she was researching her recent book,\u00a0Minding Bodies:\u00a0How Physical Space, Sensation, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-teaching"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Kathryn Byrnes","author_link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/author\/kbyrnes\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/baldwin-clt-teaching-times\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}