ix
Foreword
P
icture this: A teacher walks up to a student and asks him, “Where is your book?” The
student, without hesitation, responds that his book is at home. The teacher responds
in a frustrated tone, “Well, what is it doing there?” Without hesitation, the student quips
back, “Having more fun than I am.” I have no idea if this really happened, but the prem-
ise is relevant to the subsequent pages of this book. However, before reading one more
word of this foreword or book, I want you to close your eyes and picture the perfect
classroom. What do you see? What is the teacher doing? What are the learners doing?
How would you describe the physical environment? What do you notice about the feel
of the room?
My guess is that you did NOT picture students sitting in fearful silence, the teacher
continuously talking, and desks arranged in symmetric rows. There may even be small
pieces of tape on the floor that provide geographic markers for the arrangement of those
desks. Well, Ron Nash does not picture this type of classroom, either. The classroom
he pictures in his mind, and I do as well, is a classroom that is interactive. The teacher
and the learners are interacting with ideas and concepts, facilitated by the skills and
processes associated with those ideas and concepts. There is dialogue and discourse
around the day’s learning that moves learning forward, not just through the acquisition
and consolidation of ideas but the assimilation of feedback given and received by the
teacher and students. This interactive classroom is not a figment of our imaginations.
The interactive classroom exists in many schools around the world.
My daughter, Tessa, is 7 years old and a very active first grader. My son, Jackson,
is 4 years old and is an equally active preschool student. Having visited both of their
classrooms as a parent, I have witnessed the impact of an interactive classroom on the
growth and achievement of learners. This growth and achievement encompasses cogni-
tive and social-emotional learning, not solely reserved for the benefit of standardized test
scores. Yes, through their interactive classrooms they interact with reading, writing, and
arithmetic but in a way that allows them to interact with their peers and teachers. They
are learning to ask questions, dialogue with their peers and teachers, and make meaning
of the world around them. As I said earlier, this type of learning environment is neither
a figment of our imaginations nor an anomaly. However, there is still work to do.
In The InterActive Classroom, Ron Nash walks us through the components necessary
for creating a learning environment, a perfect classroom that maximizes the growth and
achievement of all learners. His extensive experience as an educator allows him to paint
a picture for you that is transferrable to your own classroom by maximizing the emo-
tional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement of all learners. This picture brings together
research on how students learn with the practical application of that research to strate-
gies and approaches to teaching and learning. From structured conversations, managed
movement, music, clarity, and making thinking visible through writing, Ron Nash rips
up the tape off of the floor for the rows of desks and shows us how to ensure that if your
book is left at home it will NOT have more fun than the learners in the classroom.
Ron’s approach is rooted in three of the most fundamental rules of engagement:
(1) how you feel is real; it is the link to how you think; (2) where the mind goes, the
person follows; (3) we can influence both 1 and 2. Focusing on emotional engagement,