Why Won't Mrs. Gallas Just Give Me Notes?
- Lindsey Gallas
- Sep 16
- 2 min read
It was Parent Teacher Conference night during the year that we switched all of our lessons from traditional notes to going ALL IN on EFFL, and parents had A LOT of questions about what we were doing. To be honest, they were the busiest conferences we ever had! Parents were concerned about this "new style" because their students had been coming home talking about how they wished we would just give them the notes. "It would be so much easier if they would just tell us what we need to know." One parent even said, "My child learns better when you spoon feed her."
No, they don't learn better, they memorize better.
What we explained to parents was the value that came with the struggle. Students develop a stronger, more long-lasting understanding when they discover the concepts on their own. What we did realize from this experience was the importance of being transparent about this process with students. It's so important that students understand that they are supposed to struggle! And struggling does not mean that they are failing, it means that they are growing.
We knew we wanted to find a way to make the research on authentic learning accessible to our students. And we knew just where to start! An article came out in the Harvard Gazette in the fall of 2019 detailing a study that shows the benefits of active learning vs. passive learning.
Active learning occurs when students are active participants in constructing understanding. In math class this often looks like asking students to solve problems before they’re taught how to solve those problems. Passive learning, on the other hand, is what happens in more traditional lecture-based classrooms, when the teacher exposes students to content directly.
What was surprising in the findings was that students in the study who were in a passive learning setting actually thought they learned more than the students in the active learning setting. Yet the students in the active learning setting outperformed the students in the passive learning setting.
Performance vs. Perception
We wanted our students to read this article and discuss the importance of the struggling. To help facilitate this, we came up with a set of questions to guide their discussion (an EFFL lesson about EFFL? Yep!) You can get a printable version of the article as well as our handout below. The first two questions are meant to be discussed prior to reading the article, and the last three questions are meant to be discussed after reading the article.
We'd encourage you to take the time to share this research with your students also. We have found that being transparent with our students about why we teach the way we do has helped us the most with getting them to buy in to the process.