Sophia University Junior College Division Faculty Journal
第 41 号, 2020, 1-18

Active Learning in Large-scale Classes:
Lessons From the Field
Chris Oliver
Abstract
This article examines problems related to the use of active learning methods inclasses with large enrollments. Defined in contrast to “traditional” forms of classroom
instruction, especially lecture-based classes, active learning emphasizes classroom
practices in which students play a more overtly active role in the production of learning.
Given that active learning lends itself especially well to small classes, this article focuseson three problem areas that arise when attempting to bring active learning to large-scaleclasses: the monitoring of student involvement, rapport among students, and student
attitudes toward active learning itself. Drawing upon English-language literature on
active learning that includes both teacher-oriented, practical works on active learning aswell as social-scientific research articles on active learning in large classes, the present
article finds that the literature provides no clear-cut solutions to those three problem
areas but does suggest directions in which teachers might apply their efforts.

Introduction
Active learning is defined in contrast, whether explicitly or implicitly, to traditional
forms of classroom instruction, particularly those centered around lectures deliveredby the teacher as a figure of authoritative knowledge. As the University of Minnesota’s
Center for Educational Innovation puts it, for instance: “Active learning is any approach
to instruction in which all students are asked to engage in the learning process. Active
learning stands in contrast to ‘traditional’ modes of instruction in which students are
passive recipients of knowledge from an expert” (Center for Educational Innovation,
University of Minnesota, 2019; cf. Blaz, 2018, p. 9). Thus, in active learning, students
are envisioned less as passive receptacles of knowledge than as active participants
producing the learning that takes place in the classroom. While the term active learning
is somewhat of a misnomer in that it refers not to learning per se but instead to an
approach to teaching, it nonetheless emphasizes classroom practices in which students
play a more overtly active role in the classroom through any of a wide range of activities
that may include reflective writing, paired discussions, small-group projects, and role─1─Chris Oliver

plays (O’Neal & Pinder-Grover, n.d.). These activities may be used alongside—if not as
an outright replacement for—more traditional lectures.
Active learning lends itself especially well to classes that are relatively small insize. A simple example of this, from my own experience in required English courses
with enrollment normally between 24 and 30 students, is a “recap” activity based on
written work completed outside of class. Following two class sessions of study devoted to
one textbook chapter, each student completes outside of class a one-page, template-likerecap sheet concerning that unit, the contents of which include summarizing material
studied for the unit, analyzing and explaining the problem covered in the unit and its
significance, and—for students working with English-language material when thatis not their native language—applying vocabulary and grammar that they may havelearned when studying the unit. Students then bring their completed recap sheet to thefollowing class session, orally share the contents with others in pairs or small groups,
and discuss with one another the content of what they have mutually shared. Because
the textbook units afford various interpretations of problems covered therein, students’
understandings and explanations of the problem are informed by their own perspectives
rather than there being a single “correct” definition of the problem. Thus drawing
on students’ own subjectivity, the recap activity typically runs for approximately 20
minutes, with students interactively reviewing, synthesizing, and analyzing course
material.
At the same time, it is abundantly clear that active learning activities often do notscale up easily to classes with significantly greater enrollment. This I have experienced
in courses I have regularly taught for more than a decade: Cultural Anthropology andIntercultural Communication. Both are elective, content courses taught in English, notEnglish courses per se, with readings and written work in Englishi. While there can bevarying definitions of what constitutes large-scale—e.g., in Barkley & Major (2018), a
large lecture means a course with more than 100 students—here I will take it to denotecourses with a sufficiently large number of enrolled students whereby the instructor
and students subjectively feel that the classroom learning environment is too full ofpeople to be intimate, and where it is difficult for teacher and students alike to know
every person in the class by name. This applies to both of the above-named courses.
Over the years, the Cultural Anthropology course I have taught has had roughly 50-70
enrolled students, and Intercultural Communication has typically had 80-110. In thelatter, the class has normally been taught in a large classroom with approximately 20
rows of desks from the front of the room to the rear, creating a situation where there─2─Active Learning in Large-scale Classes: Lessons From the Field

is a certain interactional intimacy between the instructor and those students seatedclosest to the front of the classroom, but which progressively diminishes with the greater
physical distance between instructor and students toward the back of the classroom.
To date, these courses have been taught largely as lecture courses, with active learningcomponents used alongside the lectures.
Drawing on my experience over the years with these courses, in this article I firstreflect on and elucidate some of the key factors that help make active learning work
well in small classes and not work as well in large classes. In particular, I focus on thefollowing three factors: the ability of the teacher to monitor what is transpiring among
students during active learning activities; rapport among students as they interact
with one another in class; and the extent to which students are attitudinally “on board”
with participating in active learning. I then turn to the academic and teacher-oriented
professional literature dealing with active learning in higher education to ascertain what
solutions, if any, it suggests for the three above-mentioned problem areas. While an
exhaustive review of the literature on active learning is beyond the scope of this article,
I nonetheless draw on a number of books and articles published in English ranging fromnuts-and-bolts handbooks for college teachers to social-scientific research articles on
active learning in large-scale college classes. The literature on active learning does, as itturns out, offer suggestions that involve considerations of logistics, pedagogy, and evenethics.

Key factors that make active learning (not) go well
There are numerous factors influencing how well a given active learning activity
might unfold in class, including how well prepared the instructor is, how clearly theactivity’s objectives are defined, the physical arrangement of the classroom space, thedegree to which the instructor exhibits an authoritarian demeanor, and so on. Here,however, I focus on three factors that, in my own teaching experience over the years,
play a particularly important role in helping active learning work well in small-scaleclasses and preventing it from working similarly well in large-scale classes.
Ability to monitor
In small-scale classes, one key factor that helps make active learning easy tocarry out is purely logistical: because there are relatively few people in the room, theinstructor can effectively monitor what is transpiring in the class among all pairs orgroups of students. In a class of, say, 30 students who are engaged in small-group work,

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the instructor can easily meander among the groups, listen in on their discussions, andoffer group-specific guidance as needed.
Not surprisingly, it becomes increasingly difficult for the instructor to monitor
active learning activities the greater the number of students enrolled. In a class with
100 students, for example, a single teacher without any teaching assistants cannot
effectively keep tabs on what the entire room of students is up to, know whether they
are all on task, or provide timely guidance to each pair or group of students that may
need it. In this way, the active learning task can be carefully explained and assigned by
the instructor, but without the instructor able to monitor the entire class, it is largely up
to the students themselves to stay on task.
Rapport among students
A second factor is that a small class size enables students to become familiar with
virtually everyone in the class, to become comfortable with another, and develop good
rapport among themselves. While students may be total strangers to one another at
the start of the term, especially if they are first-year students new to campus, this canquickly be overcome in a small-scale class, especially if the instructor provides activities
structured so that students mix and become acquainted with one another. The rapport
that develops helps facilitate active learning activities where students need to interact
with others.
The greater the number of students in the class, however, the greater the likelihoodthat most students will remain strangers to one another. An active learning activity that
calls for students to be put into random pairs or groups may suffer as a result.
On-board attitude
Third, for interactive active learning activities to go well, students overall need to be
attitudinally “on board” with the doing of active learning, willing to actively participate
in and commit to the activity presented to them. In my experience, the overwhelming
majority of students in small-scale classes are indeed on board in this regard. There areoccasionally a very few students who may be only reluctantly on board but who, for thesake of conviviality and maintaining rapport with their classmates, elect to participate
rather than behaviorally withdraw themselves from the class activity. Occasionally,
there may be students who have social anxiety or other mental health issues that makeit difficult for them to interact comfortably with others in class. While such cases canpresent challenges to the doing of active learning activities, in small-scale classes that─4─Active Learning in Large-scale Classes: Lessons From the Field

I have experienced over the years, because students do get to know one another as
individuals, they are very often attentive to and make efforts to include those students
who may be finding it psychologically difficult to engage with others. Small classes also
make it easier for teachers to identify such students and to make efforts to accommodate
their needs.
Here as well, size matters. From my experience, the larger the class, the greater
the likelihood that there will be significant pockets of students who are not sufficiently
on board with engaging in active learning tasks, especially when those tasks involve
working with other students with whom one is not already well acquainted. In somecases, there may be students with psychological or other issues that make it difficult forthem to engage spontaneously with other students as well as students who would simply
rather not have to interact with others in class. In a large class, it may be very difficult
for the instructor to know who these students are, let alone find ways of accommodatingthem during activity time.

Examples of active learning activities in large-scale classes
For the sake of illustration, this section describes three examples of active learningthat I have attempted to incorporate into my Cultural Anthropology and Intercultural
Communication courses in recent years. Problem points in each are highlighted.
Example 1: ICC experience sheet
In the Intercultural Communication (ICC) course, one activity I have used is similar
to the recap sheet described earlier that is used in the small-scale required English
course: i.e., each student is to complete in advance a one-page sheet, and then use it inclass as the basis for information-sharing and discussion. Rather than writing about the
textbook unit just covered, however, as in required English, each student is instead towrite about one recent communication experience of her own. Done a number of times
over the semester, it is meant to serve as a kind of reflexive communication journal that
includes factual description, interpretation, and application of concepts covered in class.
While the activity works reasonably well with some students, particularly those who sit
nearer to the front of the classroom, on the whole it does not. With over 100 students
in the course in spring semester of 2019, for instance, it was impossible to monitor the
many dozens of pairs of students around the classroom as they shared and discussed
their ICC experience sheets with one another. Moreover, a handful of students would
each solely occupy a three-person desk, each an island unto herself, either by choice

─5─Chris Oliveror because of not having any friends or close acquaintances in class with whom to sit.
Such “loners” generally would not engage in discussion with others—even if the desk
immediately behind or in front of them was occupied—unless individually urged to do soby me. An even greater number of students would not have even completed the writingin advance and would instead use the discussion time to do so, thus circumventing theintended purpose of this simple active learning exercise.
Example 2: Impromptu mini-discussions
In both my Cultural Anthropology and Intercultural Communication courses,
I regularly include at various points in my lectures brief, seemingly spontaneous
discussions among pairs or small groups of students (whomever is sitting adjacent
to each other), a method referred to as “bookending” (Allen & Tanner, 2005) that canbe one component of interactive lecturing (Barkley & Major, 2018). For instance, theCultural Anthropology course includes a lesson focused on the kula exchange that occurs
among residents of the Trobriand Islands and that revolves around two specific typesof objects—armshells and necklaces—that are generally not used outside of the kula
and thus have no value in terms of everyday practical use. Early in the lecture, I pause
to have students consider how we assign value to objects in our lives. For instance, I
ask them to think of one specific object of theirs that has value to them although notmonetary value and perhaps not even practical use value; then, to explain to one or
two other students what that object is and what value it has to them. This short active
learning exercise, which takes only a few minutes, is intended to have students actively
think about value in a way that they perhaps do not normally do, and to use thismoment of reflection to lead into a fuller examination of value in the lecture. While most
students in the class respond well to this type of mini-discussion, it is also apparent
that some students quickly go off task in their talking (and the larger the class, thegreater the incidence of this), and that “loners” as described in Example 1 generally do
not engage with anyone. For students who are actively engaged and on-task, this kind of
impromptu mini-discussion can be effective, but the effectiveness is unevenly distributed
among the students in the class.
Example 3: Intercultural simulation
Toward the end of the semester in the Intercultural Communication course, one
full class session is devoted to carrying out a kind of role-play called an intercultural
simulation. The students in the class are randomly divided into groups of approximately

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six people, each of which in turn is divided into two sub-groups (A and B). All thestudents in the A sub-groups then move to another classroom, and while they areaway all the B sub-groups receive a sheet of paper informing them of the imaginary
country they are “from,” some of the culturally ingrained values and communicative
tendencies they have, and that they will soon be hosting a small group of visitors froma foreign country. In the other classroom, the B sub-groups receive a similar paper, andin the privacy of their respective classrooms each A and B sub-group prepares for their
upcoming encounter with the people from the other country. Following the prep time,
the A and B sub-groups meet, invariably run into difficulties, take another preparatory
break, and then meet a second time. Logistically complex, the simulation is intended
to give everyone in the class a shared communication experience that can be used toconsider a number of topics and concepts covered earlier in the semester; it is also meant
to provide a shared basis for introducing issues to be covered in the remainder of theterm.
While the activity usually goes quite well overall, there is always significant
unevenness from one group to another in terms of how effectively the simulation plays
out. In the majority of the groups, the simulation seems to proceed as desired, with most
students participating actively and staying on-task. In some groups, however, it does
not go smoothly, with poor dynamics within or between the sub-groups. This could be
due to a lack of basic rapport stemming from the fact the groups were thrown together
randomly, or to a clash of personalities, or perhaps to pre-existing animosity between
some of the group members. With a large-scale class, there are too many students to beable to foresee possible problems in groupings, too many to allow close monitoring to see
what might have gone wrong in a given group. In some groups, the A and B sub-groups
essentially stop interacting with one another mid-way through the role-play, either
because they think they have “finished” or perhaps because too few of them are truly
on board with doing the simulation, which does in fact demand a significant amountof effort. Moreover, a very small handful of students occasionally even depart from theclassroom at some point between dividing the class up into random groups of six and theend of simulation. Among them may be students with psychological issues for whom it
would be a struggle to interact intensively with random classmates for most of an entire
class session.

Directions suggested by the active learning literature
Given that active learning is especially well-suited to small-scale classroom

─7─Chris Oliverenvironments, it is not surprising that the professional, teacher-oriented literature on
active learning has tended to give rather short shrift to large-scale classes. Blaz (2018),
for instance, provides a good summary of research on the effectiveness of active learning
as well as detailed descriptions of numerous specific active learning activities that canbe used in foreign-language classrooms. However, it has virtually nothing to say about
active learning in large classes. Fortunately there exists a growing body of research on
active learning in large-enrollment classes, some of which touches upon the three topics
of concern outlined earlier: the ability of the teacher to monitor student participation,
the quality of rapport among students, and the extent to which students themselves areon board with active learning.
Ability to monitor
The primary challenge to monitoring what is transpiring among students in a largescale class during active learning activities is that the instructor cannot physically beeverywhere at once in the classroom, and as a result is able to monitor only some of themany students in the class. A commonly used solution to this problem is to increase thenumber of people in the class who play teaching roles, such as by employing graduateteaching assistants. Godlewska et al. (2019), for instance, describe the manner in which
they converted a large introductory geography class with approximately 400 students
from a lecture format to a blended, active learning format. They did so by breaking theclass into smaller groups that stayed together throughout the term; key to this was
the team of nine teaching assistants who helped provide feedback and coaching to thestudents in the course. Yet, the use of such additional teaching-side personnel is not a
viable option for those of us faced with budget constraints that do not allow for teachingassistants or who lack a ready supply of qualified assistants.
Another common solution is to employ student-manipulated technology such as
electronic clickers that allows many streams of feedback to be simultaneously sent fromstudents to teacher. Some have experimented with using smartphones in place of clickers(Remón, Sebastián, Romero, & Arauzo, 2017; Álvarez, Baloian, Zurita, & Guarini, 2017;see also Marbach-Ad & Sokolove, 2002). Generally speaking, such use of technology
in class, whereby feedback from a multitude of sources is sent instantaneously to theteacher, serves best to enable the teacher to ascertain how well students are keeping
up with the progress of the lesson and how well they are understanding the lesson
material, rather than allowing the instructor to actually monitor whether each pair orgroup of students in class is staying on task, running into problems in interpersonal

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Active Learning in Large-scale Classes: Lessons From the Field

dynamics, and so on. In this sense it is a partial solution to the problem of monitoringin a large-scale class. Nonetheless, the prevalence of smartphones today as well as theeasy availability of online surveys and other data-collecting services offers one option for
those of us in classrooms without school-provided clickers or other similar technology.
Yet another approach to the problem of monitoring is to disavow the problem inthe first place. As noted by Barkley (2009), there are differing visions of the role to beplayed by the teacher in an active learning classroom. While some view their role asthat of a hands-on coach who closely monitors what students are doing in class, offeringcorrections when needed, and working closely with students to help them performbetter, others suggest that the teacher’s ideal role is more of a facilitator whose mostimportant task is to carefully prepare the learning activities and environment in which
students will engage in self-directed learning. This does not mean the teacher should
be off “wandering the halls while their students are working in groups” (Bean, 2011, p.
199), but the instructor-as-facilitator plays a less hands-on role in the learning activities
once under way, purposefully standing aside to encourage students to take responsibility
for and manage their own learning.
Rapport among students
As noted earlier, one factor that helps make active learning activities successful,particularly those that involve students working in pairs or small groups, is good
rapport among students. In large-scale classes, this can present an obstacle given thatsuch classes are often characterized by anonymity (Benjamin, 1991; Tniby, Weiss,& Rousseau, 2014), whereby many if not most students are essentially strangers to
one another. If directed to work in pairs or small groups as part of active learning,
students may struggle to do so comfortably. Speaking presumably of American contexts,
Barkley (2009) points out that class civility can sometimes be a problem, with students
exhibiting disrespectful or even hostile behavior, and suggests preemptive measures
such as establishing a class civility policy at the start of the term. This and other steps
taken by the teacher can help create a sense of the class as a learning community inwhich students “feel that they are welcomed, valuable, contributing members (Barkley,2009, “Chapter 9,” para. 1).
As Robinson et al. (2015) make clear, one key challenge concerning active learningwhere students are expected to share and discuss ideas in groups is that they may
become overly concerned with group harmony at the expense of productive discussion.
Such group work, particularly when students are not very knowledgeable about the─9─Chris Oliver

topic at hand, creates what the authors refer to as “face-threatening interactions” wherestudents are often very sensitive to how they will be seen by others based on what they
say in class. One student interviewed thus described in-class brainstorming in thefollowing way: “brainstorming is not as interesting as it could be because we’re almost
like too afraid to say things because of what the other person might think” (Robinson
et al., 2015, p. 17). As this student’s comment shows, students may well be aware that
other students in their own group are all in the same predicament and tend to behave
similarly. Students may become so concerned with maintaining social harmony within
their small group that they end up avoiding voicing differences of opinion. This can
indicate a significant measure of friendliness, mutual concern, and rapport among
students, but this kind of restricted rapport—reminiscent of Basil Bernstein’s (1964,
ii

1966) well-known notion of restricted code —can actually impede the quality of learningthat takes place among the members of the group.
The authors rightly point out that overcoming this may require “more advanced
communicative skills than those upon which individuals usually rely on in everyday
conversations” (Robinson et al., 2015, p. 14). Put another way, while convivial rapport
among students is without doubt important for active learning to work well, anotherdimension of rapport—one more academic and amenable to the expression of ideas andexamination of arguments—may also need to be deliberately cultivated among students.
Such intellectual rapport will likely not emerge spontaneously from ice-breakers andother exercises used to promote conviviality; teachers may need to teach students how
to engage in discussion as a prerequisite to undertaking extensive, discussion-oriented
active-learning activities.
On-board attitude
A recurring theme in the literature on active learning is resistance or “pushback”
from students about the prospect of having to participate in a course organized around
active learning or that incorporates elements of active learning, particularly in large
classes (e.g., Lambach, Kärger, & Goerres, 2017; Messineo, Gaither, Bott, & Ritchey,
2007; Nguyen, Yu, Japutra, & Chen, 2015; Tniby et al., 2014). Messineo et al. (2007, p.
125), for instance, report that their efforts to apply active learning methods that worked
successfully in small classes to larger classes did not go over well: “Attempts to divide
students into discussion groups were met with apathy, group projects were greeted withresistance and frustration, and individual research projects were met with anger anddisbelief.” In subsequent research, they found that experienced students (non-freshmen)

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Active Learning in Large-scale Classes: Lessons From the Field

tended to be less committed to large classes and to see group work in such classes as awaste of time (Messineo et al., 2007). Similarly, another study found that while students
assigned a high value to both lectures and being active in class, this did not extend togroup-based, cooperative learning activities (Machemer & Crawford, 2007).
One plausible reason for this is the anonymity afforded by classes with large
enrollments (Benjamin, 1991; Machemer & Crawford, 2007). As noted by Benjamin(Benjamin, 1991, p. 70), “some students enjoy the anonymity of the large lecture classthat leaves them with little responsibility other than taking notes. Students reportfeeling less pressure in lecture classes, and the larger the class the less pressure theyfeel.” Machemer & Crawford (2007, p. 24) offer a similar view: Students may in factchoose to enroll in a certain class precisely because it is large, “because they seeka teacher-centered learning environment, where they can be passive observers andpreserve their anonymity.”
The attitudinal opposite of student pushback to active learning in large classes iswhat Cavanaugh et al. refer to as “buy-in,” a term that relates to “individuals’ feelingsin relation to a new way of thinking or behaving” (Cavanagh et al., 2016, p. 2). In thecontext of active learning activities in a classroom, buy-in can reflect how students
believe in the validity or usefulness of the active learning activity and how committed
they are to participating in it. Some maintain that a key way to promote buy-in, as such,is to explicitly “sell” students on the value of the active learning methods to be used inclass. Tniby et al., for instance, note that despite the educational merits of using teambased learning (TBL) in large classes in international relations and comparative politics,“some students may not appreciate either the requirement of working in teams or theextent to which they are asked to take responsibility for their own learning. …The best
strategies for minimizing student pushback are to be extremely clear in laying out thecourse structure and requirements, to avoid being defensive or apologetic about theapproach, and to explain or demonstrate the benefits of TBL” (Tniby et al., 2014, p. 191;
see also Baepler et al., 2016).
One means for cultivating student buy-in to active learning is by adopting the
EPIC model, comprised of exposure, persuasion, identification, and commitment. As
described by Cavanagh et al. (2016) and applied to an anatomy and physiology classinvolving more than 200 students, the process of operationalizing EPIC buy-in proceeds
through four steps: “from 1) exposure to active learning, to 2) persuasion that these
activities are good, to 3) identification that the activities are good for them personally,to 4) commitment to this way of learning” (Cavanagh et al., 2016, pp. 2–3). Whether one

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adopts this particular model for increasing student buy-in to active learning, the moregeneral implication is that the act of explicitly making students cognizant of the active
learning methods being used and the rationale for their use—particularly if these are
not common in the large-scale classes students ordinarily experience—may serve to help
get students more fully on board with the active learning activities that the teacher isincorporating into the class.
Nevertheless, a somewhat thorny issue that remains is how to deal with thosestudents who I described earlier as “loners,” who in a large class sit by themselves withno one immediately next to them and who make little or no effort to engage others inclass. Even though they may understand, at an intellectual level, the arguments infavor of active learning, at an emotional and behavioral level they may not be truly on
board with or may even feel incapable of doing active learning, especially if it involves
intense interaction with other students. There may be any number of reasons for this—introversion, extreme shyness, social anxiety, depression, etc.—which in a large classare not necessarily evident to the instructor. Cooper and Brownell (2016), for instance,
examine the experiences of students with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer,intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA) identities in active learning classrooms. In classes
involving significant active learning, the social dynamics between students become moresignificant, making certain identities more salient; the authors report that LGBTQIA
students “do not always experience the undergraduate biology classroom to be awelcoming or accepting place for their identities” (Cooper & Brownell, 2016, p. 1). In asimilar vein, students suffering from depression, social anxiety or other mental healthissue may be at their limit in merely coming to class, let alone being expected to actively
communicate and discuss their ideas with others.
The literature on active learning in large-scale classes seems to have little to say
about how to accommodate the various possible types of students who normally sit
aloneiii. Weimer (2012), for instance, suggests question-discussion among students as
one method that can work well in large classes. The assumption here is that students
are in fact seated next to someone with whom they can discuss the questions: “Students
may write ideas about answers, they may talk about answers with those sitting next tothem, and they may explain answers to each other” (Weimer, 2012, emphasis added).
One possible takeaway from this is that even in a lecture course that will occasionally
include short periods of discussion among students, the teacher can either require thatall students be seated next to someone, or that as a rule all students be seated next tosomeone although certain students may be exempted from this policy. This could be─ 12 ─

Active Learning in Large-scale Classes: Lessons From the Field

enforced, for example, through a seating chart or through assigned groups of students
who will be expected to work together in class. Many of the case studies and studiesof active learning in large classes involve class models where the large class is divided
into groups and all students, presumably, belong to a group so that it is impossible foranyone to be sitting alone. Connell et al. (2016), for example, report positive outcomes inchanging a large-enrollment biology course so that active learning was used extensively,
a process whereby students were placed in assigned groups and remained in thosegroups for the duration of the academic term (see also Godlewska et al., 2019).
Teachers can certainly pair up students or assign them to groups, as a matterof course, or arrange the classroom layout so that it is physically impossible for any
students to be sitting with no one next to them. In some cases this may be appreciated;in others it may simply make the students uncomfortable and not qualify as respectfultreatment of students as individuals. Given that college teachers today are sometimes
asked to make reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities or health issues
that could impair their ability to take part in classes, one cannot help but wonder if it
is right to address student pushback by trying to sell students on the merits of active
learning without equally investing ourselves in listening carefully to what they have tosay. A pedagogical and ethical dilemma that presents itself here is what to do if we cometo realize that there may be students who in fact have valid reasons for not being fully
on board with participating in active learning activities, particularly those that demand
them to interact intensively with other students. How do we respectfully accommodate
them without undermining the sense of on-boardness among other students in the class?

Conclusion
As discussed above, the professional and research-based literature on active
learning, while not offering clear-cut solutions to the three problem areas of monitoring,rapport among students, and attitudinal on-boardness, does suggest directions in whichteachers might apply their efforts. Concerning the monitoring of student engagementin active learning tasks, one possible direction is for the instructor to embrace a shift inperspective and relinquish the perceived need for thoroughgoing, real-time monitoringof student involvement in class and to instead place more emphasis on helping students
understand how to better contribute to the production of learning in active learning
tasks carried out in class. The problem of rapport may require recognizing that convivial
rapport among students does not necessarily engender the kind of intellectual rapport
expected of them in active learning activities. Finally, the commonplace stance in the─ 13 ─

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literature that active learning will in all likelihood involve students actively engaging
with and, in a sense, revealing themselves to one another begs us to consider how best to
respectfully deal with those students who resist or find it difficult to commit themselves
intellectually, emotionally, and behaviorally to active learning activities.
One issue not addressed in the present article is the role played by cultural factors
in efforts to implement active learning. This is hinted at, in passing, by Lambach et al.
(2017, p. 562), who briefly comment about the students in their study: “the students’extensive experience with the traditional lecture format has socialized them into alearning culture that is characterized by memorization and that is highly focused on
succeeding in written exams.” Though the authors do not develop the point, readers caninfer that “traditional” modes of teaching and learning are culturally variable and tied
to students’ understandings of the value of learning, their regard for teacherly authority,
their ingrained beliefs about what constitutes effective study, and their sense of propercomportment in the classroom. The active learning literature taken up in this article,
while predominantly coming out of the U.S., also draws upon research and case studies
from Canada, the U.K., Germany, Spain, and Chile, but the significance of differencesin educational environments is left largely undiscussed therein. Just as active learning
does not easily scale up from small-scale to large-scale classes, the question remains
as to what issues emerge when active learning is transferred across from one nationalcultural context to another.

References
Allen, D., & Tanner, K. (2005). Infusing active learning into the large-enrollment biology
class: Seven strategies, from the simple to complex. Cell Biology Education,
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Active Learning in Large-scale Classes: Lessons From the Field

Notes
i

While the primary language of instruction is thus English, in-class discussions among
students are typically carried out in Japanese, at the students’ discretion.

ii

In Bernstein’s formulation, restricted code is characterized by the assumption of areduced need for speakers to explicitly articulate themselves to others due to a closelyshared set of interests, expectations, and identifications. The more the intents ofothers are taken for granted, “the more likely that the structure of the speech will
be simplified and the vocabulary drawn from a narrow range” (Bernstein, 1964, pp.
60–61).

iii

Practical tips on how to accommodate “introverts” (e.g., Magna Publications, 2017;
cf. Bain, 2004, p. 131 on “shy” students), while useful in cases where the instructor
can with certitude identify certain students as introverts, applies only to a limited
segment of those students I am referring to here.

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