Are You Utilizing Active Learning in Your Dental Hygiene Classroom?

I had an interesting experience with my 6 year old daughter a few weeks ago. She is at the perfect age where  she loves to pretend play. A few days ago, I came up to her in the front room with a complete restaurant set up with dishes, silverware, cook books for menus, and her as the server and cook, complete with one of her dance hair nets. Another game she has been playing is “school”.

Now, I remember playing school with my neighborhood friends. We would all want to be the teacher because it was always the most fun. As the teacher, you could write on the tiny chalk board, make worksheets, stand up in the front of the class and talk to the students sitting on the ground. And honestly, being the student was no fun. Sitting in a blanket, we’d wait around for more work sheets or to be told what to do by our “teacher”. So when my little one asked me to play school with her and to be the student, I had flashbacks to those days.

However, her game of school was completely different than this memory. She had a classroom set up with me on the couch as a desk, but I was rarely there. One minute, she was leading me in a reading group, taking turns reading sections of a Dr. Seuss book. The next minute, she had me in a different part of the room dancing to a song she heard at school. Next, she put Post-it notes with numbers on different walls and I had to match up math equations with these numbers. As I was moving around, I couldn’t help but think about all the active learning that’s happening in her classroom. She’s obviously mirroring what happens during her school day, and recreating it in her pretend classroom.

Having her learn through active learning showed to me that it is never going away. Are we as dental hygiene educators incorporating active learning into our classrooms? How are we going away from strict lecture classes only and moving into this student focused learning? As new students are coming out of high school and into our programs, they’ll be accustom to active learning in their classrooms. How are we changing to keep up with this way of learning?