In these first weeks of school, I have kids setting goals for themselves and their year. One girl said that she wasn't very visual and had trouble imagining the details of setting in certain books. She felt it was impeding her ability to enjoy those books and to understand them as deeply as she wanted to. She didn't demand books that better suited her strengths. She recognized that if she wanted to access an important text that didn't play to her reading style, she'd need to adapt.
So it's great to hear some brain scientists sending us a message that underscores the importance of a varied teaching style. Whether or not the purported "auditory" and "visual" learners really exist, good teaching is going to constantly mix up the ways kids are asked to engage with material. They need to read, to draw, to visualize, to move, to argue, to listen, and to do the million other things a great intellectual does to grapple with a meaningful set of concepts.
And I love that this piece challenges our bias towards the status quo. The human brain always runs under assumptions—without which we couldn't function effectively—but some of the most deeply embedded common wisdom is probably false, so we need to be questioning those obvious things that we take for granted, at least once in a while.
And I love that this piece challenges our bias towards the status quo. The human brain always runs under assumptions—without which we couldn't function effectively—but some of the most deeply embedded common wisdom is probably false, so we need to be questioning those obvious things that we take for granted, at least once in a while.
I'm challenging myself this week to mix it up. I tend to rely heavily on writing-as-thinking and discussion as a sort of default mode for approaching a text, but I'm going to challenge myself to get my kids moving, drawing, flow-charting, or carving wax sculptures.
I agree that it is a disservice to label someone a particular type of learner; that person may come to believe those limitations exist. I don't think Howard Gardner ever imagined how distorted and misused his theory of multiple intelligences would become. He was trying to shed light on how to strengthen types of thinking that don't necessarily come easily to a person, not create an institutionally sanctioned default of avoidance. The school structure of moving kids from one subject area to another only exacerbates the problem. Isn't the moment when learning becomes joyous when you push through the area of resistance instead of letting it slip away? And I'm coming to your class when you carve wax sculptures.
ReplyDelete"an institutionally sanctioned default of avoidance..." that is an extraordinary way to put it.
ReplyDeleteAnd you're exactly right when you compare it to the artificial separation between disciplines. If we didn't have art in a different wing, at a different time, in different periods, we wouldn't have to work so hard to mix it all back together.
Kristin - yes, you're making sense.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think that you raise one of the scariest issues with tracking. Inasmuch as it attempts to separate students by ability level, it does more to codify a student's sense of his potential in terms of a fixed amount of ability. That's one of the reasons that tracking is as much of a self-fulfilling system as it is.
If we extend the sense of "visual learner" as a limited and limiting self-conception, "mid-level learner," or "low-level learner" might be even more limiting and even more dangerous self-conceptions.
You know what's extra-special scary? The fact that the teacher's conception of a class or of a student in a particular way might be as powerful—and in some contexts, more powerful—than the student's self-conception. Even if we come into the room with the best intentions, our subconscious attitudes communicate our expectations for behavior and intellectualism.
"One girl said that she wasn't very visual and had trouble imagining the details of setting in certain books. She felt it was impeding her ability to enjoy those books and to understand them as deeply as she wanted to. She didn't demand books that better suited her strengths. She recognized that if she wanted to access an important text that didn't play to her reading style, she'd need to adapt."
ReplyDeleteThat's me! I know - roughly - what my strengths are, and that I can succeed in life by emphasizing those strengths. But at the same time, I don't want to leave my weaknesses be and let them "rot," per se. Sometimes my perceived strengths fail me; or, conversely, I am surprised by how well I do at something that I had viewed as a weakness.