Engagement and joy in the active learning classroom

Abstract

It is common when implementing active learning to have concerns about whether students will meaningfully engage in planned activities and discussions.­ Within the physics education community, we are fortunate to have access to a collection of best practices on promoting student engagement and fostering a productive classroom climate. Written for the physics teacher audience specifically, this collection includes a variety of useful tips and resources that are directly applicable to a variety of physics classrooms and are freely available at www.physport.org. In this column, I hope to contribute to this broad conversation about promoting students’ productive engagement in a different manner by sharing a few pitfalls that I fell into during my first few years of physics teaching—pitfalls that created barriers to students experiencing joy as a central and defining feature of their active learning experiences. Some of the challenges I faced in creating a more joyful active learning classroom were related to tacit beliefs I held about active learning that were at times counterproductive, including notions that