October, 2010 Blog - The National Dropout Rate – How Active Learning Can Help

[Greg Timmons]

You might have noticed recently a lot of chatter in the media about the national dropout rate. Last spring, President Obama spoke on this subject calling it a crisis that the nation cannot afford to accept or ignore. "Not long ago you could drop out of high school and reasonably expect to find a blue-collar job that would pay the bills and help support your family. That's just not the case anymore." the president said at The America’s Promise Alliance Education event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Depending on what poll you’re reading, the dropout rate in the United States is between 25 and 30 percent. In Vermont, it’s about 12 percent and in Nevada it’s nearly half (48%). In fact, it’s been reported that over 12 percent of the nation’s schools have a near 50 percent dropout rate. And as every teacher knows, this problem doesn’t start in high school. Dropouts begin their journey early in their education. The responsibility isn’t just with teachers or the schools. Families, communities, public and private organizations, and students themselves can and must play and active and positive role in helping kids stay interested, focused, and in school.

There are a lot of resources available and one I’d like to share with you is from the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network. It recently published an article entitled “Active Learning.” Acknowledging what educational research tells us—that not everyone learns in the same way (some are visual learners, some auditory, and others kinesthetic)—teachers need to use a variety of activities to meet the learning styles of their students. The article goes on to describe a number of active learning strategies such as cooperative learning, experiential learning, and project-based learning that engage students and provides recognition for their accomplishments. These strategies also play to students multiple intelligences and can easily integrate different subjects such as science and Language Arts. Extensive educational research shows the benefits of active learning strategies are that students are more engaged, become more involved in their learning, attain higher academic achievement, and improve their academic skills.

I invite all members of the Teacher’s Center to review the Active Learning article at the NDPCN site and send back your thoughts, your experiences with active learning strategies, or any other related ideas you might have.

[Lanore Larson]

Thank you for the thoughtful summary of and link to the article. I definitely had that experience. The school I taught at for 13 years had a 60% drop out rate. Although the administration said it was 2-8% and also said that the school was just in a "transient community", every year for 13+ years over 1000 freshman entered the school and around 400 graduated. What I heard from both my at-risk and not obviously at-risk students was that they learned and remembered more in my class due to my focus on active learning projects. Even now, I run into them in public and they say the same thing.The counselor would tell me every year that I had substantially less truancy from my classes. I had one student who left my class due to incarceration. When he later returned to school, he was not in my class, but he stopped by to thank me for challenging him. Those moments more than repay the time spent preparing for active learning projects.