What Does Active Learning Do?

"Winning Over The Big Guy" - A True Story

A few months after attending Lilli's 3 A's of Active learning training in Austin Texas, the Little Rooms we ordered finally arrived. I was excited about giving a homebound student an opportunity for learning as nothing much had been going on for her up to this point. This delightful three year old female was diagnosed as vision impaired with a degenerative disease, severe and profound cognitive disabilities, and other health impairments. Her life up till then had been at home with a full time nurse, with visits from ECI, OT, and PT.

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.