"The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn."
Alvin Toffler

Going Fishing with More Than One Hook.

Expanding Learning Styles Accelerates Learning

When I describe the benefits of expanding learning styles, I often use an analogy of going fishing. When you go fishing, do you take only one hook? And would you expect to increase your success at fishing if you had more than one hook, in case the first one "didn't quite do the job" or you lost it? Increasing your odds of being successful by increasing the ways in which you can catch fish is a wise move. The same is true for increasing the ways in which you can learn easily and effectively. If you think you are an "auditory" learner, for example, to attempt to learn primarily with this one channel would be like fishing with one hook. However, if you expand your learning styles and increase your ability to use all your modes of learning, it would be like having a bunch of fishing equipment. Give me a tackle box, please.

In another article we discussed helping students to go beyond a "diagnosed learning style" or "pigeon hole" to become multi-sensory learners. In this article, we will share some other stories and our idea or definition of "accelerated learning". Several writers of learning-to-learn books agree that we are not stuck in one mode and that "Superlearning" is not necessarily "super". Our learning just appears to speed up or become extraordinary when we have the keys.

In Africa one day, I watched a young native boy use a key to start a car for the first time. He had seen cars and heard them run, but he had NO IDEA how that all came about. My friend allowed the 8 year old to sit in the front seat, handed him the key and showed the boy how to start the car. When the child turned a key IN the car and the motor IN THE FRONT of the car sputtered, he was amazed. The native boy could not imagine the connection. The idea seemed extraordinary.

I notice a similar response with students of all ages who discover how to access their visual ability or get in touch with their kinesthetic way of knowing. They are often AMAZED at their "super-powered new" abilities. We are all NATURALLY multi-sensory learners as little babies, and this includes tasting and smelling the world about which we are learning. Using our senses—all of them—works! Why do we change and get stuck in a limited mode?

Brain 101

We wish we knew. What we don't know about our brains is still a frontier. However, several learning specialists I have talked with believe that many of our learning difficulties are created. This seems very plausible if you consider Maclean's Triune Brain theory which emphasizes three divisions in the brain. He describes the brain stem, which controls the very basic instinctive responses, as our "fight or flight" center. The second area is the limbic system. This "mini-brain" controls emotions, sexuality, and the pleasure centers. And finally the neocortex controls our intellectual processes, auditory and visual capacities-the AV department.

The significance of the triune theory for learning and learning disabilities and how they could be created is that the limbic system is the area through which impulses are filtered, involuntary behavior translated to rational thought. The theory is that our personalities are determined by the interaction between the limbic system or "gatekeeper" and the neocortex ("thinking" brain). Psychologists believe that learning takes place through an interaction with the AV department and the "fight or flight" center through the limbic system. There are indications that the limbic system is essential for long term memory.

Emotions and Learning

Therefore, if the emotion is absent (e.g., boredom) or negative (e.g., fear and anxiety), there is interference in the ability to remember or learn. We recognize that one of the most effective ways to appeal to attention and memory is through our emotions–when we are "involved" (emotionally) we learn easier. (I once read that we learn four times faster when we're having fun–and that has been my experience!)

For some students the fear of test taking can block their memories-going blank is the result. That can lead to failure of low self esteem. One such student was "Billy" (see article: "I'm Not Mentally Retarded.") Billy was yelled at by his LD teacher for two years when his thinking strategy was too slow for her and she thought he was dawdling. At the end of the third grade he was tested and had an I.Q. of 75-his remembering and thinking were blocked. After learning about expanding learning styles and how his brain and emotions worked together, Billy was retested and had improved his I.Q. He went on to finish high school, mainstream, making B's and C's. He was so petrified by the yelling that his brain couldn't think.

Many studies have been done solely on memory, because "thinking skills" are difficult to measure in a controlled study. However, my clinical experience shows me that thinking skills (critical, analytical, planning, etc.) are definitely affected by emotion. We often call it "test anxiety", "feeling overwhelmed", or the like, but what we are talking about is that the BIG K takes over–kinesthetic mode–and visual, auditory are blocked and even the "intuitive knowing part" of the kinesthetic system is distorted.

Success Story

Amy is a great example. She is very verbal, bright and reported an uncanny ability for spatial perception. When she travels with her family all over the world, once she has been to a place she can remember how to return to it easily and can remember what is around the area. She has fun when she travels and all of her sensory systems are on "go" so she learns her way around easily. She conceptualizes the "big picture." However, when it came to the Civil War in history class, her strategy changed. She relied totally on her auditory modality and incorrectly sequenced events, losing the big picture.

When we began to "play" with history and have her become a character fighting to abolish slavery, Amy took on a persona from that era and became involved in the visual and feeling components of the story. She was amazed at how well her memory worked when the information was recorded in "3D"--three learning channels!

Colin Rose, Accelerated Learning, agrees that "the ideal learning method will ...employ a full range of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic activities to make learning comfortable and to invoke the maximum response." A key word is "comfortable". Remember a time when you learned something easily, suddenly had the solution to a problem or became so caught up with interest that you "automatically" learned something? Almost everyone has had some experience that could be called "accelerated" or natural learning.

I have another example of expanded learning styles which create more effective learning. Jeff is a new client of mine. He was about to fail five out of six subjects, had been to tutors and psychologists and had asked his parents to check him into a psychiatric institute in the hopes of finding out what was wrong with him that he couldn't learn. His parents enlisted the help of his physician, Dr. Mary Ann Block, in convincing him to see me "just once" before making a decision that he couldn't learn and had a poor memory.

In building rapport and getting to know Jeff, I asked him what he liked to do. He liked to be an actor. Also in our conversation about why he was in my office, what his goals were for our work; he stated he had a "memory problem." I casually asked him about what kind of plays he was in, what kind of parts, etc. His face lit up and what I was able to learn is that he had NO TROUBLE remembering his lines!! So it appeared his "memory problem" didn't occur in this context.

I discovered his strategy (thinking skills) for remembering his lines. He would say them to himself, while picturing the scene in his mind and have a sense of what the emotion or action was that went with the particular line or lines. What that amounts to is multi-modal learning including having a feeling associated to particular information that helps him recall that information! Learning is simple, it is super. It is NOT learning that is difficult!! Jeff was gleeful to discover that he DID know how to learn, and that it was fairly simple. I framed it as a resource he already had and that all we needed to do was to change contexts. Needless to say, he made another appointment and was very excited about what he was now able to accomplish, even in history class.