Active Learning

In ancient times, during the Middle Ages, and even today, many writers refer to the mind of a child as a tabula rasa, Latin for an erased tablet, a blank board upon which the teacher writes. I think that all those authors must be men who have never taught a young child anything at all. People who work with children know that they have minds of their own. A child's nervous system begins to develop and respond long before birth, so even the mind of a newborn is not a tabula rasa.

In order to learn something, a person has to take it in, think about it, and connect it with previous experience. If information goes from the teacher's words directly to a notebook or test without becoming meaningful to the student, no learning has taken place. That information has merely passed over the surface of the mind like water over a raincoat. Such meaningless, disconnected facts can't provide a foundation for future learning because they are soon forgotten.

Many students sit passively and wait for the teacher to pour information, like so much water, into their heads. Recently I had this conversation with a student:

"What would happen if I opened your mouth and poured water down your throat?"

"I'd drink a lot of water."

"No, you'd drown. You have to swallow the water yourself. I wouldn't be able to just pour it into you. Learning is like that too. You have to take it in and connect it with something you already know."

Meaningless rote memorization has, thankfully, been mostly relegated to the trash heap in today's schools. Modern education includes many hands-on experiences. There are manipulatives in math, experiments in science, field trips and projects in social studies, writing and performing in English. Students have more opportunities than ever before to connect with the information being presented. Human persons, however, are complex creatures. Just giving students experiences, however, doesn't necessarily mean that they will associate those experiences with appropriate interior frameworks. Students can do many things with very little understanding of what they are supposed to be learning.

Over the years I've reached the conclusion that the most effective teaching methods provide hands on experiences and also associate those experiences with images, words and symbols. Sensory information not connected with language or images, remains unprocessed and unusable. So too, language or images not associated with experiential meaning aren't retained.

Powerful teaching methods present experiences, images, language, and symbols together. For example, having a young student point to the numbers on a hundreds chart and count them builds an excellent foundation for achievement in math. The students uses touch and movement to learn one-to-one correspondence, and at the same time, learns the words and symbols for numbers up to a hundred. For older students, explaining a new concept to a partner, using information to draw a diagram or solve a problem, dramatizing it, or singing about it fleshes out the bare bones idea and gives it a memorable meaning. Sometimes it seems that this kind of processing takes more time than just repeating memorized information. However, the opposite is true. Knowledge that becomes part of a person builds a strong foundation for future learning, so that the educational process becomes progressively faster and easier. In the long run, much time is saved.

Understanding things is deeply satisfying. Whenever I see a smile play about the lips of a student during a teaching session, I know that the student is making those internal connections. I also realize that the student will want to understand more and more to feel that satisfaction again and again. Active learning has begun. It will grow through a lifetime.

Mary Sue Laing, M.Ed.
Resource Teacher, St. Ambrose School
newskill7@msn.com

by Mary Sue Laing, M. Ed., New Skill, Inc. Academic Tutor