Final session for me. We’re going to be flying out on an earlier flight so I can get to a wedding tonight. Actually, if this makes it to the blog at all, it will be posted sometime tonight or tomorrow. So I guess I should say that we flew out on an earlier flight so that I was able to get the wedding Friday night. Bah, I really wish that they had Wifi here.
Enough semantics, the first session this morning gave us a chance to try out some of the activities ourselves. They created 15 centers and we went around the room doing the activities. I always feel a little foolish doing that sort of thing. One of the activities is walking on a balance beam, heel to toe, with your eyes fixed on the wall in front of you. They had a card describing the activity. They had a photo of a child doing it. I got the picture. I really didn’t need to actually walk along the blue tape line to figure it out. I know, I know, it’s just to make sure that we understand what the students are going to be doing so we can provide clear instructions and concise goals for them. I still feel that the time might have been able to be used better though.
I remember when I was at the University of Iowa, we were trained in an unusual science curriculum. It basically involved handing the students a set of batteries, wires and lightbulbs and having them play with them for a week or two. There was little to no instruction, the students were just supposed to experiment and then record their results. I could see how the program might be effective. However, the way we learned the program was by doing the very activities that the students were supposed to be engaged in…. for the entire semester. We never really got into the theory behind the curriculum, we were never taught how to implement it, instead we just played with science projects for a few months. It didn’t take long before we all grew to despise the program. I don’t know if any of my colleagues implemented it, but I know I never did. I can’t say for sure whether it was solely because of the way it was taught to us, but I certainly have lingering negative associations with the program.
It’s really not fair to compare that science program to SMART, but doing all the activities this morning did remind me of it. Honestly, I think they could have the same effect by simply setting up all the activites, having them all available throughout the day and letting people check them out as they desired throughout the day. It would give us attendees the chance to experiment with them individually, and allow more time to be spent on instruction and learning new material.
I’m sure there were people who loved having a set time to do all the activities, different strokes for different folks. It just isn’t my cup of tea to spend an hour on something that I could read about and understand in about 10 minutes.
Back to the subject at hand, this final session is covering results of the S.M.A.R.T. program. In case you couldn’t guess, they’ve found some positive results to the program J I won’t bore you with the details, but they did say that they have some graphs on their web site, so maybe I’ll include a few links. Oh yeah, if you’re interested in that massive chart that details all the different developmental levels and areas that this program is designed to address, it can be found at www.actg.org under Neurological Physiological Rehabilitation. It’s in color too. I’ll have to get that printed out on a plotter or something and put that up somewhere.