Aliza Libman Baronofsky is a teacher of Humash and math and dean of seventh grade students at the Maimonides School in Brookline, MA. In this article, she shares her experience with three years of an active learning trial she conducted in her middle school Humash classroom.

The rocky transition from elementary to middle school presents itself in many ways – some students relish the freedom, the variety of switching classes, and the increased ability to learn independently. For many students, who they are outside of the classroom never becomes a part of who they are as learners. At parent-teacher conferences, parents have long told me of their children’s love of anime, Broadway musicals, soccer, and scouting. Yet these very same middle school students often sit quietly and dispassionately in Humash class, willing to do the work, but not to invest in their own learning.

In January of 2006, I had become dismayed at how my middle school students learned parshanut – one or two students would read, translate and participate, while the rest would wait for others to do the intellectual heavy lifting, and write the notes down in their binders. These students displayed plenty of intellectual curiosity and loved to predict Rashi’s opinion and answer discussion questions. This curiosity did not extend to wrestling with parshanut.

This disinterest in parshanut, in my opinion, does not typically stem from lack of interest in Humash. My students have always eagerly recounted midrashim their previous rebbes taught them, and acted out scenes from parashat hashavua with creative flair. As our students get older, though, we increase their access to texts in their original languages in the name of academic rigor – and student interest drops off dramatically. Couple the language barrier with an ever-increasing desire to just “be told what is on the test”, and teachers of parshanut face an uphill battle. Do we prioritize skill-building over content, or content over the need for students to grapple slowly with commentators writing in their original language?

“Stations”: An Active Group Work Methodology

In a moment of inspiration, I created a complex system of classroom learning centers, or “stations”, designed to be worked through by small groups of eighth grade students, so that they would engage in parshanut study in a more active manner. My goals were primarily skills-based. I wanted to make sure my students could find and follow any commentator on the page of a standard Mikraot Gedolot; I also wanted them to enter high school with increased ability to read and translate parshanut. Most importantly, I wanted to put all of my students in the driver’s seat of their own learning and to create an environment where they would do more than faithfully copy notes off the blackboard.

When I first designed the stations, we were about to being a study of Devarim 5, with the Aseret Hadibrot as a central text. We began the unit with a peshat overview of the story, laying the foundation for students to investigate parshanut questions in small learning groups. I cherry-picked the eight dibrot I most wanted to teach and designed learning stations for each. The tasks on the stations included reading texts, discussing them with others, and making follow-up illustrations and charts, all the while moving between stations. The stations were designed to activate many of the multiple intelligences. Visual learners drew a comic strip of someone violating Lo Tahmod, according to the opinion of Maimonides, verbal learners could easily identify repeating words, intrapersonal learners benefited from discussing ideas, and kinesthetic learners were stimulated by movement between stations. The variety of tasks involved created conditions under which students would learn actively, using guiding questions and clues to “crack” the puzzle that each commentary provided.

As facilitator in the student-centered classroom, I restricted myself to creating the learning stations and then requiring students to work through their challenges before calling on me for help. To minimize student frustration, we made text resources available including dictionaries and other texts from the library, as well as human resources, at times including the school shlihim and learning center personnel for students with learning disabilities.

While some groups were wildly successful, others had major trouble getting off the ground. The difference between the groups who struggled and the groups who succeeded was often attitude and personal chemistry within the groups. All students worked with carefully chosen guiding questions that framed their discussion and were given enough information in word banks to approach the commentaries successfully. In some memorable cases, though, groups spent so much time fighting over who was going to read first that they ran out of time. Other students wouldn’t listen to the ideas of their classmates or wouldn’t share their own thoughts. As a values educator, I considered it a crucial secondary goal to have students realize the value of each person in contributing to the discussion, and the requirement to take responsibility for the success of the members of their group.

Over four academic years, I have used this methodology to teach units on the Aseret Hadibrot, deaths of Nadav and Avihu, and parashat Shoftim to eight groups of seventh and eighth grade students. Each year and each class was a dramatically different experience, with some succeeding where others struggled, and some responding with excitement while others just groaned. In every case, though, there was more engagement and activity in my classroom with stations than existed in a frontal setting, and many groaners came to anticipate the stations eagerly.

Differentiating Instruction

The greatest challenge was creating a singular experience that incorporated differentiated instruction, a school-wide goal in our heterogeneously grouped middle school. My first approach was to group students appropriately, dividing students according to gender, language proficiency, and assigning students with learning disabilities to smaller groups. In one noteworthy case, I grouped an easily discouraged student with learning challenges with two very patient learners of different skill levels in our Aseret Hadibrot unit. Though he was greatly successful with that unit, disappointingly, in a four-person group in our later ‘stations’ unit, this student was far less successful, largely because in the second group, he was both overlooked and unwilling to ask for help. In some similar cases, personal disputes I was not aware of made an entire group less successful.

I targeted students in need of enrichment by creating opportunities for them to lead their groups and share their knowledge with others. I included “super-speeder bonus boxes” on many stations, which provided an extra commentary as a bonus learning opportunity for enrichment for quicker and more proficient students. The students were, if not motivated by desire to learn, then motivated by the prospect of bonus marks on tests and quizzes.

For all students, proficiency in all content was not required at first – students were graded on one station out of every two they did, and were required to perfect and present two stations to the class. In a unit of eight stations, perhaps four or five were graded, and each student dropped their lowest score. Where applicable, some students with learning needs were graded on even fewer stations, giving them time to review and process the material before content assessment. By the time the test or final project came around, students had reviewed the information multiple times in different contexts, with some students receiving the benefit of repeated explanations and some perfecting their abilities to explain complex ideas by taking a leadership role.

Assessment

Assessing skill expectations is much more challenging than assessing content. Has a student demonstrated the ability to read Rashi by answering a question about its content on a test four weeks later, or is the student instead showing knowledge of content? Alternatively, assessing an individual’s success at reading an unseen Rashi alone and with no external resources is unrealistic in relation to how I want my students to apply the skill: In an information-rich world, I expect they’d read a Rashi with a hevruta and many external resources in any future study.

I balanced my assessments according to my various expectations: Scores for a few of the stations, to assess how they can access a text with limited resources, a presentation grade to assess how they present or transmit the information on one station, a group work grade to assess how well the group worked together, and a test or quiz to assess the content.

The two challenges that presented themselves were both all-but-insurmountable. Students came into my class focusing almost exclusively on the test, because that had usually been their previous teacher’s style. Not all students took the group work, presentation, and station accuracy seriously at first. Though they came to improve in this area, the second challenge remained: For the teacher, this amount of assessment is substantial, when grading almost forty students on four stations, two presentations and a test. It quickly became clear to me that the tradeoff of high-feedback student learning is the time needed to provide feedback to individual written work.

Though students typically enjoy the active learning component of the stations, they become anxious about being assessed on material that is self-taught or partially taught by other students. This year, I scrapped the usual test on all Aseret Hadibrot stations, and gave students forewarning of an open-notes quiz. Students were motivated to pay attention both individually and to their classmates and take in the information, but the stakes were lowered on the content they might not have learned too well. They instead were responsible for a specific station in depth, but assessed in a limited way on material taught by others. This altered form of assessment made them less anxious, more motivated to focus on group work and the presentations of others, and was less challenging for me.

From One-Size-Fits-All to Individualized Assignments

In my third year using the stations format, I eliminated the seventh grade stations unit, choosing instead to teach it frontally. I determined that the seventh grade students I was working with did not have the skill toolkit to do the stations as I designed them, and that more practice reading Rashi and midrashim as a class would be of greater value than independent study. In effect, my goal of skill-building through independent parshanut study was realistic only for exceptional seventh-grade classes. However, I maintained the eighth grade stations units that year, since I thought that they were giving me very good information about how well my students could read texts while creating opportunities for students to control their own learning.

This year, my eighth grade content goals changed, and the long Aseret Hadibrot stations unit did not make sense. Instead, I revamped the preexisting stations into individualized hevruta assignments personalized and tailored to each pair. Students with advanced Hebrew proficiency got basic word banks for all-Hebrew sources with key words underlined while students with limited proficiency got fill-in-the-blanks translations that looked like Mad Libs but enabled them to translate and make sense of commentary at their own level. My ability to implement this level of student customization this year was due to the small class size I was blessed with.

Student Responses to Active Learning

Student reactions to the stations have always been mixed. Some students thrive on group work, exploration, and enjoy taking an active role. However, many students would greatly prefer to be taught the material frontally, or simply told what will be on the test. The greatest challenge, though, was creating appropriate groups. Students prefer to be with their friends, but often don’t work well with their friends. Others prefer to work alone.

This challenge was reflected in the course evaluations I gave some classes, where I asked specifically if they “find studying texts in stations or small groups to be valuable” and if this study “increased your learning or involvement”. While the results of my course evaluations are far from statistically significant, I noted that feelings about the stations was about split down the middle, with most students who didn’t like the stations commenting on the group work elements. Student comments about their groups included “it is more productive to work alone” and “they slowed people down”. These comments belie student goals that are not in line with mine. Other students were upset that “the people in the group is annoying” (sic) and “sometimes the groups didn’t get along”. Many students felt the opposite, including those who don’t find frontal learning to be ideal for them. The student who wrote “I work better when I am talking out loud” made me feel satisfied that mixing frontal and active units helps me reach different types of learners. My classroom channeled the spirit of the Talmudic yeshiva when a student wrote “I loved working in groups and having small arguments about what we were learning.”

In Conclusion

Learning centers provide a different modality for students to learn, creating student-driven learning that attempts to empower students to take charge of their own learning. Teachers who implement learning centers in their classrooms must clearly define their goals and then create active learning experiences that allow students to achieve these goals. Sharing goals with students, making sure students understand what work is being assessed, and paying close attention to student satisfaction and group dynamics are all indispensable components of a successful student learning experience. Ultimately, creating individualized learning with extensive feedback will most successfully maximize active learning.