Imagine for a moment a physics classroom. After the students have come in and seem ready to begin class, the teacher says that they are going to begin a new unit on mechanics. He begins the lesson by getting students (and himself) to stand in a circle and begin passing a tennis ball around. At first the teacher tells the students to pass the ball at a constant speed or velocity. Then he says, "Accelerate the ball!" After a few moments, "Now, decelerate it!" The teacher now turns the activity into a game, students may take turns calling out "constant velocity," "accelerate," and "decelerate." As simple and as unusual as this activity is, this teacher has a reputation in the school for doing such activities in his physics class.
In another school, an earth science teacher is playing classical music while she reads a story to the class about how the giant continent of Pangea broke up, and drifted apart, creating new ocean basins, pushing rocks together to form huge mountain chains, and causing earthquakes and volcanoes. After the story is read, students get into small groups to collaborate and create a metaphor of the story, e.g. a drawing, a clay model, or a diagram.
The head of the biology department is seen taking her students outside (once again). This time, the teacher explains that the students are going on a "still hunt." Once outside, the students are assigned to sit in an area of the school grounds (this school has a wooded area to which the teacher takes the class quite often). For five minutes the students sit in their assigned area watching for the presence of organisms----ants, spiders, earthworms, birds, mammals---anything that they can see. They are asked to observe and to record their observations in a Naturalists Notebook. The students are assembled at the edge of wood and report their findings from the still hunt. Then the teacher gives the students modeling clay, string, paper, yarn, buttons, cloth, and toothpicks, etc. and says, "Design an animal that will fit into this environment but will be difficult to be seen by other animals." When the creatures are completed students place them in "their habitat." The teacher then has the whole class walk through the area looking for the creatures to find out how well they were designed to survive unnoticed in their environment.
Each of these teachers is implementing a model of learning which some refer to as integrative learning. It is a model of learning which suggests that all students can learn with a limitless capacity, and that students can learn by interacting with their "environment freely, responding to any and all aspects of it without erecting barriers between them."
The learning cycle used in the integrative learning model consists of three phases: input, synthesis, and output. Equal emphasis is placed on all three of these phases. The origin of integrative learning can be traced to Georgi Lozanov, of the University of Sophia (Bulgaria). Lozanov had discovered a method of learning which involved the use of music to help relax the learner, the creation of an atmosphere in which the mind is not limited, presentation of new material to be learned with what is called an "active concert," followed by a period of relaxation, and ending with a series of games and activities to apply the new material that was learned.
The Lozonov method made its way to the United States and can be found in such work as superlearning, accelerated learning, whole brain learning and so forth. Peter Kline, developer of integrative learning has stressed the importance of student synthesis and output in learning. In the integrative classroom, the teacher encourages students to use their personal styles of learning (see McCarthy, Chapter 2), and thus provides auditory, kinesthetic, visual, print-oriented and interactive learning activities. Music, movement, color, mini-fieldtrip, painting, the use of clay, pair and small group discussion are an integral part of the integrated learning model.
In Chapter 12, Science for All, a more complete exploration will be made of the integrative learning model.