​WHAT IS HIPP TRAINING?
HIPP: Hoffmann Integration Processing Program
HIPP - the Hoffmann Integration Processing Program was designed by Dr. Lee Hoffmann, a Resource Specialist (Special Ed teacher), working in her classroom with struggling students. Over a twenty-three year period of trial and error, Dr. Hoffmann discovered the root cause of many learning problems - from ADHD to dyslexia - in a disorganized brain. This disorganization reveals itself in low skill levels of key learning traits: memory, attention, pattern recognition, sequencing and information processing. The results are familiar student behaviors such as forgetting homework assignments, or forgetting to turn them in, inability to focus, follow directions, or participate in class.
Dr. Hoffmann found new ways of looking at data, as well as new data to study. She also developing a new model of learning by studying the neural pathways in the brain. In struggling students those pathways fail to connect in ways that allow consistent, efficient and joyful learning. She further realized, long before scientists confirmed, that neuroplasticity plays a key role in learning. With this new data she hypothesized that if a curriculum were developed to help the brain rewire itself, by improving foundational learning skills, learning would then take place naturally and easily.
Through her trial and error efforts (all tasks were tested on groups of students to determine efficacy), Dr. Hoffmann eventually gathered a series of exercises and materials that she used to create her curriculum, focusing on auditory, visual and motor channels. Neither her tasks, nor the diagnostic methods used, were random, but rather chosen through a long period of trial and error during which they retained their predictability, where literally hundreds of others did not.
Brains respond to stimuli. Give the brain specific stimuli and it will behave in specific ways. HIPP exercises are designed to stimulate the brain to constantly stretch its learning skill levels through small, orderly, sequential steps that add up to big changes. In the course of HIPP training students/clients are presented with many auditory, visual and motor tasks-to-complete. These tasks strengthen and integrate neural pathways in the brain that improve learning efficiency.
The number of tasks a student/client might complete in any given hour of HIPP training far exceeds the number of tasks required in a normal classroom or at work, sometimes a hundred or more. There’s a reason for this.
Students/clients who need HIPP typically don’t think of themselves as successful. They know they have learning deficiencies because they see their classmates/colleagues complete tasks which they struggle with. HIPP begins with simple tasks that can be completed. As soon as one task is completed, another - a bit more complicated and challenging - is presented, and then another, and so on, until the tasks reach a very sophisticated and complex level, and the student easily completes them. Concurrently, in school or at work, students/clients discover they can easily and quickly complete assignments that previously caused them anxiety.
Through this organized, systematic increase in the complexity-of-stimuli students discover they are capable of completing tasks, and that it feels good to be capable and successful. In short, they discover that learning is fun and rewarding.
This is the essential ingredient in every independent learner. When learning is fun, exciting and rewarding, no outside discipline or reward is necessary. The student/client is self-motivated and eager to learn. We designed HIPP to offer every student/client, regardless of intelligence, social status, emotional maturity or economic restrictions, the stimuli their brain needs to learn how to work efficiently and effectively at processing information. When learning is fun and rewarding, effort is replaced with excitement.
