Active learning

AMLE says:

Students and teachers are engaged in active, purposeful learning.

Instructional practices place students at the center of the learning process. As they develop the ability to hypothesize, to organize information into useful and meaningful constructs, and to grasp long-term cause and effect relationships, students are ready and able to play a major role in their own learning and education.

It means:

Education is a two-way street.  Despite our official role as educators, we also learn from our students.  Heck, there have been times when I've had a student lead a reading lesson to see how well they pick up the skills, academic and social, I taught them.  Other times, I've had students do presentations on things that interest them, such as Bone Thugz 'n' Harmony.  It's great for expanding expressive speech and language skills, as well as for letting them know I'm interested in all of them and not just the parts that do math and science and bop people on the head while out in the community.  Moving on...this is about empowering students and providing them with opportunities to exercise agency in their own education.  Use "hands-joined" activities, where teachers and students work together.  This collaboration facilitates mastery of concepts, helps develop meaningful relationships, and reflects democratic processes.

Example:

8 students at Longfellow Middle School spent a day off teaching teachers how to make advanced podcasts, as part of Coulee Kids Podcast series.  Podcast coordinator Jeanne Halderson guided students in basics and let them "learn on their own" to develop advanced podcasts, using technology such as GarageBand.  Students say this is fun, that they learn collaboratively and independently, and that the opportunity to teach their teachers is unusual -- but good.  Here is the link to the podcast website.

Why it works:

The entire premise of the Coulee Kids Podcast series embodies active, purposeful learning.  The practice, enabled by Ms. Halderson, is entirely student-based.  It allows them to construct advanced knowledge through experiential learning and to demonstrate mastery of their skills/knowledge by teaching it to their teachers.  If that doesn't scream two-way street and "hands-joined" activity, I don't know what does!  From the students interviewed, it is obvious that they feel confident in their technological and teaching abilities, and that they feel ownership over their learning.  This is a great example of how one might implement active learning to develop meaningful student-teacher relationships and democratic processes, not to mention hitting a bunch of CommonCore Learning Standards -- which are really pushing technology.

My classroom/school:

Something I have worked very diligently on with my students is social skills, which are in turn linked to functional skills.  Even for those who do go out into the community with their families, acquiring social skills as early learners who fall on the profound end of the autism spectrum is very difficult.  To address this deficiency, we (students' families, my paraprofessionals and I) identified areas where students needed to be able to practice or generalize social and functional skills.  Depending on individual abilities and needs, I wrote social stories or modified newspaper articles about the place where we would go.  We practiced in school before venturing out into the community: restaurants, parks, cafés, libraries, book stores, grocery stores (a very hard one!), the dollar store, the toy store, etc.  For the two "highest functioning" students in my class as far as social skills go, we let them after some time lead us out into the community and tell us how to act.  Allowing them to teach us (staff, teacher, other students) how to enter a store (calmly and quietly!) demonstrate mastery of the skill, empowered them, and helped develop trust between staff and students.  Other students who needed more support taught us one step or a couple steps that they mastered.  For example, Meghan (name changed) mastered how to pay for things in a store.  She taught us to wait in line, hand money to the cashier, to wait for change and the receipt, and to pick up the bag at the end of the store.  Another student taught us how to safely cross streets and read traffic signs.  In my classroom, we strive for as many "hands-joined" activities as possible, but we also need to provide students with some support to ensure safety.