Articles
Learning Styles and Competence:
Sometimes those we love have a lot to teach us about learning
Keith Eric Grant, Ph.D.
One of the concepts about teaching massage that I have found myself returning to repeatedly has been that of diversity in learning styles. Such differences in our individual ways of processing input from our surroundings are the prime concern of an area of educational research called multiple intelligence theory (MI).
For some years I've been researching and using various studies and works on multiple intelligence (MI) theory and diversity of learning styles. This has lead me into the writings of educational psychologist Howard Gardner at Harvard University's Project Zero, into various digests on learning styles in the ERIC (Educational Resource Information Center), into poking around in numerous educational web pages, and into the Pathfinder Bookstore in Auckland, N.Z., where I picked up books on teaching and learning with MI written by David Lazear. I have used all of these sources to motivate diversity in presentation modalities (an NLP, neurolinguistic programming, usage of the term) in my own teaching. I have also used them in writing against those who would make massage education and competency assessment mainly an exercise in verbal-linguistic capabilities -- especially when they tended to dismiss all objections as simply not appreciating standards. Much of the MI material I have browsed through is now referenced from the McKinnon Institute links page and from the bibliography linked to the McKinnon Institute articles page.
What I had been reading from the latest in cognitive and education research steadily confirmed my own innate belief that there are many ways to learn and to display competence, and that education focused too narrowly on a single mode of learning or assessment would act more as a detrimental filter to those who did not match its inflexible screen than as a benefit. In the past year I've had these beliefs confirmed in ways that I could not have anticipated. I'll start what follows with a small story.
His day had begun with a high rate of activity before seven this morning and would likely continue at this pace until well past ten at night. Now, in the middle of the morning, it was time. For the moment, none of the Watchers were focused on his movements, giving him the chance he had been waiting for. He quickly moved to the barrier and began to climb. Reaching the top, his fingers manipulated the confinement device. He was skillful, and the device yielded to his movements. "Yea!" he thought, "Did it!". With the confinement device negated, the barrier slid aside and he was out. None of the Watchers had noticed his activities, letting him move outside and away without detection from within.
A science fiction story? A jailbreak? Not really. Merely my 3½ year old son Marty's second escape from his preschool this fall and the one that resulted in his being kicked out and turning our family dynamics on its ear. Over the past year, we've deciphered the clues and realized that Marty is hyperlexic; a realization that has propelled us into the world of individual education plans (IEPs) and specialized education that is finally almost falling into place this month. As the web page mentions, hyperlexia is often characterized by: "A precocious ability to read words, far above what would be expected at their chronological age or an intense fascination with letters or numbers, significant difficulty in understanding verbal language, and abnormal social skills, difficulty in socializing and interacting appropriately with people". So, while Marty had worn out numerous books by the time he was three, climbs with the best of them, counts over 200 on a swing, swims down to the eight foot level in the pool to pick "counting stones" off the bottom, and has learned to play the piano by ear (we think he has perfect pitch), he has generally paid as much attention to verbal instructions and authoritative posturings as our cat does, and has had little sense of things that could be dangerous to his survival.
Over the past year, we have learned to use "social stories" to advantage, these being essentially scripts for a situation written on paper and read to Marty while he reads along. This occasionally has produced some humorous moments, like the preschool aide who was had been trying unsuccessfully to entice Marty verbally out of a lemon tree and over to a climbing structure. She reluctantly tried holding up a script and reading it to Marty, looking down from his perch in the lemon tree. She watched in amazement as he climbed down and moved to the appropriate climbing structure. More recently, a speech therapist had done a script ending with "then Marty will help Miss Emily clean up". In this case, they finished the preceding list of activities early and "Miss Emily" tried to slip in an extra one. Marty began insisting that it was "time to clean up".
Amid all this Marty navigates through multiple menus on computer programs with ease, going into the file and open menus of my midi sequencing program to select one tune after another. Sometimes he plays the tune, but at other times he goes into the "tools" menu to select the option that plays only the selected staff. He continues to navigate the menus of the two levels of the Music Ace music instruction programs. I watched with my jaw dropping some months ago as, when a tone stuck on, Marty navigated out of the program to the desktop (correcting the problem), then double-clicked on the correct icon and navigated back to where he had left off.
To bring all this back to the educational level, the thing that is interesting is that Marty learns best by attacking the Gestalt. He learns by doing. Watching him learn is like watching an interlaced web graphic first display in its entirety and then successively refine as detail is added. Marty approaches learning new tunes to play in the same manner, getting some sense of the entirety and then playing, re-listening, and refining until the tune comes into audio focus for him. This model of learning is far from the sequential mode of mastering one task-byte at a time that most of us in the United States have become accustomed to in our education systems. Interestingly, my experiences with the very active Scandinavian dancing community in the San Francisco Bay Area have provided me with another example of this more Gestalt learning style. It is very close to the manner in which Norwegian folk-dance instructors teach dances to other Norwegians, repetitively demonstrating a major section of a dance without breaking it up into individual steps. Such instructors have had to modify their teaching methods significantly when teaching in the United States to provide the expected linear sequences of "step-bytes".
As the weeks have passed and we have gone through the psychological evaluations and IEP meetings with the school district, we've neared (but not quite reached) the point where Marty will be placed into a preschool classroom that reinforces his learning needs while making use of his diversity of skills. His smile and cheerful personality have continued to recruit his assessors into the camp of his supporters. Meanwhile the interim speech therapy and adaptive P.E. show their effects in his rapidly increasing use of sentence structure and willingness to follow directions. We still, however, have to pull him off the outside of tubular slides before his altitude exceeds our parental reach and catching ability.
At dinner time he quickly finishes and moves to the piano, where he creates his own medley from the March from Aida, strains of As Time Goes By, a bit of the British sea shanty Spanish Ladies, and whatever else flows through his mind and fingers. While Marty does not take requests, he does pause periodically for an applause break. We joke about putting a brandy snifter on his piano in which appreciative listeners could drop a counting stone or two. Later in the evening Marty sinks into my lap and body as we listen to the sounds of various midi files and watch the notes scroll by. He controls the mouse, decides who will sing when, and continually amazes me with his learning and joy. Marty has taught me to be a firm believer in the diversity of styles of learning and ways of demonstrating competence beyond what I have ever been before.
And oh yes, some of Marty's favorite midi files are scattered among my personal web pages . On some of the pages, tunes are randomly selected when the page is loaded or reloaded. Now, when I encounter those who believe that education and assessment only have one song, I think of Marty's words when we view and listen to such a musically enabled webpage together -- "Dad, need a new tune -- hit reload".
© November 1999 by Keith Eric Grant. All rights reserved.
Keith Eric Grant is a senior instructor of Sports and Deep Tissue Massage at the McKinnon Institute in Oakland, Ca. Wearing another hat, he practices the vocations of atmospheric physics and numerical mathematics. Should time and life permit, he pursues the avocations of Scottish Country Dancing and Scandinavian couple dancing.
Keith Grant, PhD