By Sara Finegan

           Way too many Special Education classrooms are quiet rooms where kids remain at their desks and do seatwork, supervised by staff who either sit at the front of the room monitoring behavior or roam the room, monitoring the student work. 

           I believe this teaches kids to be passive receptors of information, regurgitating facts on demand. 

         I believe this enables kids in their expectation that learning is when someone gives you knowledge.  There’s no impetus to go and get knowledge, or to use it other than to show that you learned a fact.

           Passive learners are not successful students.  Productive lives do not get lived by people who wait for things to come to them.  Critical thinkers do not develop from children who believe that a teacher’s job is to give them information.  

         In a demanding classroom, the teacher is the facilitator, and the kids are the ones doing the work.

         In a demanding classroom, there’s movement.  Kids are asked to physically get up and go find information, and to physically gather facts and evaluate them or apply them.

         There’s engagement in this way with the world they are studying, and the concepts they are mastering.  They perceive a relationship between themselves and knowledge that involves action on their part.

          We create not just the opportunities for movement in learning, but requirements for it in a variety of different learning formats.

• Kids have to get up and move around the room to read charts and find information with which to answer worksheet questions. 
• Study and reading or writing groups are assigned to different areas of the room to congregate for cooperative learning activities. 
• In math, the kids look forward to me creating equations all over the two room white boards and allowing them to come up and choose one or two each to solve. 
• We have centers set up for kids to revolve through, fifteen minutes at a time:  a table with history sorting cards to organize; one with paper to create a mindmap or analogy list from a set of listen facts; a table with scenarios for them to respond to using knowledge they have learned about a civilization or culture. 
• In math, we study multiplication facts on the playground by bouncing a ball to one another as we skip count or recite numbers. 

         We see great intellectual growth when our students are required to move through learning, not absorb it.  In a demanding classroom, intellectual movement is often accompanied by physical activity.

action, active learning, centers, demanding classroom, engagement, finding information, high expectations, kinesthetic, learning disabled, movement, passive learning, rigor, rigorous instruction, special education, standards, thinking maps, white board