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What Does Active Learning Do?
My husband and I assembled a Little Room at home and loaded it onto the truck. I
passed by my office, picked up a colleague who also came to the 3A's training,
gathered up my materials and we headed down the road anticipating the wonderful
event that was about to take place. We chattered endlessly about the
implications for having access to a Little Room would be for B…
Upon our arrival at the home the nurse looked very skeptical and commented it
was a very large piece of equipment for such a small house. We went about the
business of setting the Room up and hanging the materials. About five
minutes passed and Dad arrived home from work. Through the door came a Texas
State Trooper, hat, star, gun uniform and all, a really imposing
presence. The small living room was crowded at best. He stared at us
and Deb explained what I was doing crawling around the floor. He became really
quiet and said "your not putting my baby in that box, are you?" [That
was my initial reaction twenty years ago when a Little room was first introduced
to me.] Deb explained more of the Little Room concepts to him and how it would
work for B… He continued to stand at the end of the Little Room and stare at
me. He watched every move I made.[ Meanwhile on the floor I am no longer
assembling materials but fervently praying!] My hands were shaking and I am now
asking the powers that be to please have the child respond to the Little Room
somehow, anyhow!
The room was ready, Dad was not. Finally we positioned B…on the resonance
board and slid the Room over her. Then we waited for what seemed like a week to
me, Deb later said it was no time at all. B… started to explore the objects
closest to her with her mouth, then she tried to reach up, all the while she
looked and tried to manipulate, pull on the objects with her mouth, tried to
relocate them, move them about, and we even think she might have smiled. Dad had
tears in his eyes. He then disappeared and came running back with a video
camera and a smile and videoed the whole thing! By this time I am now chanting
to myself, Thank you Lilli, thank you Lilli! Each time I go back to visit B…
has been doing and exploring more.
I had the same experience with the second Little Room which I set up in a
classroom. Within ten minutes after the student was placed in the Room all the
staff were true believers. I spent time sharing all I have learned on Active
Learning with these enthusiastic ladies. We watched the videos, read the books
and did our homework. We now have an Active Learning Classroom set on that
campus and are constantly adding to it. We have ordered our first Hopsa Dress.
We feel truly blessed to have had the opportunity to be trained by Dr. Lilli
Nielsen and will continue to use her methods with great results.
- Marth Vincent, Region VIII Education Service Center, Mt.
Pleasant Texas What is Active Learning?
As the name implies, Active Learning revolves around the learner being
active. If you look on the Internet
or in educational literature, you will find plenty of different kinds of
"active learning" for typical learners.
It is rather ironic that while we recognize that people learn best when
they actually do something, yet it hasn't really been applied to learners
that need it the most- those with multiple disabilities.
It took a special person like Lilli Nielsen to fully appreciate this and apply
it to learners with multiple disabilities. It
is probably very natural, because learners with disabilities and especially
those with neurological deficits take so long to respond, that most people feel
compelled to supply the active quality to their interactions in a
learning situation. That is, initiate, demonstrate, show, guide their hands, help, facilitate, prompt, or
otherwise do it for them. This, however, is the crucial element.
Any action by a teacher or care provider that supplies the active element
for the learner, in many ways robs the learner of the vital essence of learning
to do something for themselves. When
sharing something new, the first reaction of a child is to play with the item
themselves to show their friend how to play with it.
As all adults will recognize, sharing and, moreover, learning requires
that the learner actually try it, do it themselves. The classic anecdote to
illustrate how futile demonstration it is should be very familiar to any parent
or teacher of typical children over the age of, say, 3 (younger than that we
would not expect true sharing). There
have been many times when I had to correct our five-year-old when he would
"share" computer games with his friends by playing it himself - he was
"showing" them how to do it. So
often do we see parents, educators and therapists engage in the same style of
behavior when working with learners with disabilities.
There is much evidence that the "guided hands" approach for children
with disabilities produces both a negative reaction and increased passivity. Virtually
every conventional and alternative form of therapy and education is designed, or
is implemented with a low threshold of tolerance for inaction.
While high-functioning children can much more easily engage in an
activity independently, learners with disabilities are seldom left to do their
own devices for any significant amount of time. Else they are left in wholly
non-learning places- literally left in a corner, or with materials or
environment they cannot productively engage in. Active Learning is
based on creating optimal environments for learners to actively learn on their
own. Principles
of Active Learning This
is the essential active learning principal - to create the
environments that feedback and support the learner so that the learner can take
action on their own initiative to learn.
It may take a lot of trust to allow a child or challenged learner to be
on their own and apparently not be accomplishing anything.
It also takes a very well tuned environment so that this time is
productive and not simply frustrating. There
is productive frustration and futile frustration.
This has been the most difficult aspect as a parent to decide when
frustration is a learning mode vs. a fiasco. In
order to justify any appreciable level of frustration, one must make due
diligence that the environment is optimally suited to learning for the
challenged learner. This is where
Dr. Nielsen's research has paid off. She
has through the years seen so many children and older learners with severe disabilities
and tried so many variations that she has identified some that work much better
than others. Design
Principles of Active Learning Equipment The
basic principles involved in designing the Active Learning environments
are: ·
Feedback - The
environment must supply strong responses in multiple modes (auditorily,
tactilely, visually) ·
Support - The
child must be supported so as not to be in pain, typically not bearing weight on
their legs fully or even partially ·
Richness- Related
to feedback, the environment must be thick with objects so that minor actions
are rewarded with feedback ·
Variety - However
rich and responsive the environment is, it must be changed periodically-
probably more often than we are inclined to think.
- Rand Wrobel
South Africa
America
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