When Students are Air-Heads, it’s a Good Thing!

Has a supervisor requested you to get your students moving while they learn? Have you noticed that kids who participate actively in a lesson learn much easier? There’s a reason for this phenomenon: When children move, they enhance the rate that oxygen circulates all through their bodies, including their brains.

According to Diane Starke, author of a Professional Development Module on Active Learning, “Learning is not a spectator sport. Students do not learn much just by sitting in class listening to teachers, memorizing prepackaged assignments, and spitting out answers.” By shifting from educator-centered learning to student-centered learning, the classroom becomes a vehicle for self discovery and a life-long zest for learning.

The change won’t be easy. Your learners have gotten comfortable with entering a room, sitting down to an assigned seat, and doing the ubiquitous do-now you posted on the board. You may encourage your students to stay in their seats while they take notes, answer questions, and finish worksheets. Near the end of the class, you might ask questions, encouraging your pupils to discuss the day’s lesson. By this time, lethargy is the student’s best friend. Some may actually be asleep.

Prepare your pupils for this new way to learn

Because most pupils have grown accustomed to sitting in one place during a lesson, an odd thing occurs when they move around. They become unruly and think that motion equals recess. They talk, they walk, they may even run around the room that first time you relinquish your control over their movement.

Here are the 5Rs of active instruction with your students: Relax, reflect, respond, respect, and review.

·Relax – Before you do an active learning experience, you need to soothe the savage beasts. Play calming songs for only a minute, have them place their heads on their desks and close their eyes to visualize your chosen subject. (Yes, I have used this strategy with middle and high school students!) At the end of the minute of relaxation, your pupils will be prepared for their active learning experience.

·Reflect – Learning includes guided reflection. Remind your students that when they start their task, they don’t need to jump in with an immediate answer (unless the activity demands that spontaneity.) Most activities require learners to think about the correct answer before responding. Encourage your pupils to think while they do the activities.

·Respond – This is the essential component of lively learning – reasonable responses. Certainly, you’ll get some outrageous, inappropriate responses occasionally. Use accepted classroom discipline methods to squash that misbehavior early. Most of the time, I think you’ll be amazed at how intuitive your students’ responses become during active learning classes.

·Respect – Need I say more? Each student should understand the value of respecting another student’s answer or opinion.

·Review – After the five to ten minutes of an lively lesson, take another few minutes to assess what the students learned, explored, or reviewed. Get their feedback. Then do your own guided discussion.

Other obstacles to your success with lively instruction

One of the strongest arguments against active learning includes time. Teachers complain that they don’t have time to develop the additional techniques for active learning. But does it genuinely take more time to set up an active learning lesson than it takes to construct overheads, develop PowerPoints, and plan lectures? I don’t think so. And the outcome is more permanent mastery of the subject which eliminates the need for re-teaching.

Another argument involves the extra resources needed for the active learning lessons that provide oxygen to your learners’ brains. Most activities can use common objects available to most teachers at little or no cost to them. Index cards, balloons, balls, and spinners cost little, but can add much enjoyment to an active lesson.

Finally, some of you may argue that lively instruction is risky. Will the pupils participate in your new style of lesson? Will they be reluctant to participate? Hmm… Did you ask yourself those same questions when you developed the common PowerPoint? The humdrum lecture on a new theme?

Whatever your argument against active learning that will get students moving throughout the classroom, the major argument for active education should be that you are handing the learning format back to the learners. You are allowing them to shape their own learning through movement.

Motion is the primary component to education, yet it is the least applied of all the planning processes. Whether that motion involves running, walking, lifting, or pointing, movement is the key to student achievement. So, next time you write a lesson plan, go ahead and integrate your goals, objectives, modifications for differentiated instruction… and ways to get oxygen to your students’ brains to produce a kinetic classroom. Go on… make them into air-heads!

www.reneeheiss.com