In order to grow as a person, at any age, a person must be mentally engaged in the process. They have to want to grow and learn; they must be an active participant in the learning process.
What does it mean to be an active learner?
We like to think of an active learner as someone who is very much like an apprentice with a mentor they’ve wanted to work with. They have a natural curiosity about life, about learning, about growing! This comes from a drive that develops in humans during infancy called the growth-seeking drive.
This drive, which is formed inside the parent/child Guiding Relationship, is not fully developed in infants that are later diagnosed as autistic because there is a disruption in the Guiding relationship.
How can the Guiding Relationship be Re-established?
The RDI® Model works with parents to help them re-establish the Guiding Relationship. Once that happens you will start to see growth-seeking in the child. This also leads to the development of Dynamic Intelligence, Intrinsic Motivation and other important development foundations that are necessary to live an independent life.
The great thing about our brains is that they continue to grow throughout our lives! That means that RDI® can be implemented for children, teens, young adults and even older adults.
Start an RDI® Program today. Find your consultant here.
Autism: A New Perspective is Available on iTunes!
Full Transcript
Kat Lee: Welcome back to Autism, A New Perspective, the podcast show where we help you understand what is going on in the mind of your child and we encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kath Lee and in this podcast Dr. Shealy talks to us about your child, active roles, and mental engagement. Let’s listen in.
Kat Lee: I remember as we’ve said over the last few months back in the day because we’ve known each other so long that, that book from 25, 30 years ago on activities that you and Dr. Gutstein published and it was very attractive to parents. I remember as a parent myself and going to your conference and having the books laid out parents were like picking those books up and what can I do with my child and people would ask in later years why was that book so popular because we know RDI is not about the specific activity it’s about the process of what we do but I think the reason was what do I do with my child. I want ideas I don’t know what to do and I think we both have a heart for that for parents because over and over they come to us no matter how old their child is whether they’re a little bitty or they’re a young adult and I don’t know what to do. And I think one of the things I learned from this process with you is it’s not about the specific activity as much as it is the child being an active learner. And I wonder how you defined an active learner because I started thinking about that and what would be an inactive learner but that does exist.
Dr. Sheely: It does exist if you think about an inactive learner an inactive learner is someone who is not necessarily motivated to learn but can receive what you’re doing and give it back to you. But it’s very unbalanced you have the teacher or guide kind of pushing the person to learn what they need to learn. Kind of like a spelling test, I don’t wanna learn spelling words, we have to learn spelling words listen I’m gonna show you how to break down a spelling word and then you’re going to spell it and so you get involved in kind of giving a person the structure for learning something, but there isn’t that feeling that that person is actually motivated to learn or that there’s a reciprocity in it or that they are carrying their own weight. You don’t feel like you are experience sharing in this situation. Experience sharing is another whole way of being in a relationship with somebody and it doesn’t have that much to do with the activity.
Kat Lee: That whole topic made me wonder why there’s more inactive learning than active learning that takes place and I think part of it might be because inactive learning though it can still be challenging I’m certainly not disparaging that, may be less challenging in the sense of you’re just giving the information what do you think?
Dr. Sheely: I think that is part of it. I think another part of it is is that it’s quantifiable. So you can say I’m going to teach you how to spell this really hard word and there are five syllables to it and oh by the way don’t forget it’s a proper noun so you have to capital. But once you have taught that you can say now I’ve been successful because you can spell that word. I have taught you to spell that word. When you look at something which relies more on the motivation of the person to take on his own learning it can get messy and it can it’s, I’m not saying it’s never quantifiable but I think it is less quantifiable because you’re looking at things that are more elusive. Maybe you’re looking at working on teamwork or maybe you’re looking on referencing for information. It’s subtle to know if somebody’s doing that and so it’s harder to do the research, it’s harder to say we worked on this for 27 times by the fourth time we were seeing this or that, it’s just, I think it’s a harder to get a handle on and it’s harder to set up the interactions so you know what you’re working on as well.
Kat Lee: I think that is such a good example for us and it leads me to so, what is an active learner a student who’s engaged? How would you define active learning?
Dr. Sheely: I guess I would define an active learner as someone who is very much like an apprentice, who’s with a mentor that they’ve wanted to work with. And over the course of my life, I’ve had several really wonderful mentors. And I never couldn’t wait to get with them to see how are they going to help me figure this out. So I think an active learner is bringing a curiosity to the table, maybe it’s a very simple curiosity in the beginning because if you think about it, infants are active learners. But you and I are still active learners as well. So there’s that active curiosity about here we are what’s gonna happen. And sometimes it’s just a lighting up of the face with a very young child, but then sometimes it’s even, it’s more specific like my grandson wanted to know how to crochet and he came to me and said, MeMo can you show me how to crochet? What was interesting about it I showed him how to crochet but he didn’t do it the way I showed him to do it. And I caught myself just before I said that’s not the way because I realized he had processed that differently and he was doing it differently and it looked like crochet.
Dr. Sheely: But it’s that sort of thing where you’re bringing as much mental energy to the table, you wanna know things, you’re looking to me as a support as a guide and you trust me to not push something at you that you cannot do, it’s way too far ahead. I think that’s that’s the way I would feel it.
Kat Lee: I think that leads us to why we focus so much on the guiding relationship for parents, building that trust and they come to us, sometimes their parents will say that interest, like your grandson asking about crochet, I don’t see it there and what we find is when we build that guiding relationship, we start to see that growth seeking in the child. And that’s so exciting isn’t it?
Dr. Sheely: It is exciting. I think it also explains why when you’re working with a child who doesn’t have autism and I’ve had parents who have several children and some of them have autism and some of them don’t have autism. They say it seems so much easier because I can feel the excitement in that grabbing hold of more they want more of it where with the child who has autism I have to be really more thoughtful. I have to be more thoughtful about how I’m going to introduce it, what the stages, how I introduce these important things that are the stepping stones to the motivation. In the beginning we have to increase that motivation. And you know Katherine, I think you mentioned that those two books that Steve and I wrote, and I think the reason those were loved so much and we had mixed feelings about them by the way, but the reason they were loved so much they were really fun, you could pick that up and you could set it up and if you did it the way we told you to do it, you would end up having fun. There would be a lot of laughter and there would be a lot of fun with it.
Dr. Sheely: The reason we were not quite sure we wrote the books correctly was because even though in the back we had a structure for development and each of those activities had an assigned objective to go with it. Typically people would pick it up and just do the activities. And so the reason you and I are consultants we know the importance of being a consultant to someone who’s on this journey to make sure it’s always objective driven. And so we talk about the engagement and the emotional engagement in things that we do, but that is also based on a bigger goal or a bigger activity that is going to see the person further down the path for taking on their own learning, I guess.
Kat Lee: And that just leads me back to where we so often end up which is the excitement that the parents have as they see this change in themselves and in their child and see their child start desiring growth. It is a exciting process and as you always say it’s not pie-in-the-sky hope it’s the real deal.
And thanks for joining us for Autism, A New Perspective. The podcast show where we help you understand what is going on, on the mind of your child. And we encourage you that growth for your child is possible. I’m Kath Lee, see you next time.
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