In Defense of Active Learning

by

Rae Pica

In the past, based on what they knew of and observed in young children, early childhood teachers designed their programs to meet their students’ developmental needs. Play and active learning were considered key tools to accommodate those needs and facilitate the children’s education. Typical activities included:

• Sorting and stacking blocks and other manipulatives (mathematical knowledge).
• Singing and dancing, or acting out a story (emergent literacy).
• Growing plants from seeds, exploring the outdoors, and investigating at sand and water tables (science).
• Trying on various roles and interacting with one another at housekeeping and other dramatic-play centers (social studies).

Today, these types of lessons are steadily disappearing. This is due partly to society’s long-entrenched belief that the functions of the mind are more significant than the functions of the body. Moreover, society has labored for years under the misguided notion that the mind and body are separate entities, resulting in the determination that learning should occur via the eyes and ears only.

Today, due to an increasing emphasis on academics and accountability, policy makers are demanding more and more testing, which requires more and more seatwork.

Today, time spent with “educational” products is replacing active, sensory experiences with passive experiences. And because parents are excited by the “evidence” of what their children are “learning” via flashcards, DVDs, and computer programs, they’re insisting on more of the same in their children’s early schooling.

What parents don’t realize is that rote learning is the result of sheer memorization. Authentic learning involves comprehension. And until a child is developmentally ready to understand what the numbers, letters, and words he’s reciting represent – until the information has some relevance to his life – there will be no comprehension.

Some rote learning has its place, of course; it’s how most of us learned our ABCs and numbers – not to mention the multiplication tables and the state capitals. However, unless a child is going to grow up to become a contestant on television game shows, memorizing facts will have little use in life once he’s passed all the tests schools require of him. Active, authentic learning, on the other hand – the process of exploration and discovery, of acquiring knowledge, of knowing how to acquire it (no one can memorize all the facts!) – will serve her endlessly. Moreover, active, authentic learning is far more likely than rote learning to foster a lifelong love of the learning process.

Additionally, recent brain research is confirming what many educators have believed all along: the mind and body are not separate entities. Jensen (2008) confirms that not only do children learn by doing – and that movement is the child’s preferred mode of learning – but also that physical activity activates the brain much more so than doing seatwork. While sitting increases fatigue and reduces concentration, movement feeds oxygen, water, and glucose to the brain, optimizing its performance. Furthermore, learning by doing creates more neural networks in the brain and throughout the body, making the entire body a tool for learning (Hannaford, 2005). Active learning is also more fun for young children, which means it matters more to them!

It may no longer be acceptable to run, jump, and dance in the classroom just for the joy and the physical and social/emotional benefits of it (sad but true). But what if movement, play, and music have cognitive benefits? What if they can be used to help children meet standards and pass standardized tests?

They can! When a child bangs on pots and pans, she learns more about cause and effect than she ever could by clicking on the limited choices offered by computer programs. She’s also experimenting with sound and the force of her muscles. She learns more from manipulating blocks and puzzle pieces than from manipulating images on a screen – because she can’t feel the images on the screen. Cutting, pasting, and scribbling provide more fine motor coordination, which she’ll later need for writing and keyboarding, than does clicking on a computer mouse. Helping to set a table or pouring water or sand from one container to another teaches more mathematics concepts than out-of-context numbers on a screen. The sights, sounds, textures, and smells of the outdoors offer more lessons in scientific principles than any two-dimensional media possibly could.

When you give children the opportunity to physically move over, under, around, through, beside, and near objects and others, they better comprehend prepositions – those little words so essential to language and life. When they perform a “slow walk” or skip “lightly,” adjectives and adverbs become much more than abstract concepts. When they’re given the opportunity to physically demonstrate such action words as stomp, pounce, stalk, or slither – or descriptive words like smooth, strong, gentle, or enormous – word comprehension is immediate and long lasting. The words are in context, as opposed to being a mere collection of letters. This is what promotes emergent literacy and a love of language.

Similarly, if children take on high, low, wide, and narrow body shapes, they’ll have a much greater understanding of these quantitative concepts – and opposites – than do children who are merely presented with the words and their definitions. When they act out the lyrics to “Roll Over” (“There were five in the bed, and the little one said, ‘roll over’…”), they can see that five minus one leaves four. Similarly, the concept of magnetism will be much more fascinating to children if they play with magnets – and then pretend to be them. The same fascination – and understanding – results when children have personal experience with such scientific concepts as gravity, flotation, evaporation, balance and stability, and action and reaction.

When you use activities such as these during circle or group time, substitute them for more traditional lessons, or use them as follow-ups to your curriculum or theme lessons, you are teaching to the whole child, using the physical and social/emotional, as well as the cognitive. That results in enduring and meaningful lessons and children who will move in leaps and bounds toward becoming lifelong learners.

References

Hannaford, C. 2005. Smart moves: Why learning is not all in your head. Salt Lake City: Great River Books.

Jensen, E. 2008. Brain-based learning: The new paradigm of teaching. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Rae Pica is an educational consultant specializing in children’s physical activity and the author of numerous books for educators and parents. Read more of what she has to say at her blog, The Pica Perspective, and hear her interviews with experts in the fields of education, child development, play research, the neurosciences, and more at http://www.bamradionetwork.com/!