Being Bright Brained

I was in graduate school before I knew how to learn. Until then, I had been spending hours memorizing whole semesters worth of content and retaining it long enough to reproduce it on exams. I held most of the instruction in my auditory memory--short term storage. Consequently, much of what I had been taught was quickly forgotten. I was not empowered as a learner because I had never been taught how I learn. 

By the time I got to graduate school, the load, complexity and specialization of the information was so great, that I could no longer rely solely on these auditory skills. I began to intuit what I needed to do to learn the information quickly, easily and reliably. I color coded my notes, and grouped concepts, recognized patterns and connected ideas through meaning. As a visual thinker, representing the bulk of my thoughts in images, I relied more confidently on my visual memory. I needed to transform the information that was coming at me, into a useful format that I could receive, represent and make permanent. I needed to make it match my visual strengths.

After graduation, I went to work for a reading intervention company called Lindamood-Bell. I was hired as a Consultant and began testing and coaching the tutors to deliver the multi-sensory instruction to students. One of the programs they teach is called Visualizing and Verbalizing. Tutors delivered explicit instruction in making mental pictures.

This was revelatory to me for two reasons:

1. I took it for granted that I made mental pictures and thought everyone did!
2. I discovered that some individuals needed to be taught how to do something that came naturally to me.

But then, a greater shift occurred. In seeing that this skill of visualizing was important enough to teach, it was as if someone gave me permission to use it, to consciously pay attention to the pictures that my mind made so easily. Instead of feeling like I was the one who was different, out of sync, incapable, I realized I had the advantage. I could do it automatically. But the life changing part was this: The expectation to visualize validated me as a learner. This was the way I thought naturally, and here were teachers, telling other students that in order to comprehend (the very definition of learning), they needed to develop this skill--a skill that I had been born with and used all the time without trying and it was the one that everyone wanted!  Not only could I be myself, but suddenly, I felt like the one with the answer.

What I have learned in the 19 years since then is that individual instruction can be even more powerful when it is combined with information on hemisphere specialization and attentional styles and cognitive processing strengths.

It has been my experience that when we engage our metacognition--the brain's ability to be aware of its own thinking and learning process--we can regulate and control information that comes in--we learn faster, better and more permanently. This is supported by years of research (Dignath, C. & Büttner, G. Metacognition Learning (2008) 3: 231). And by years of experience in the clinic and classroom. By discussing attentional style and hemisphere skills, individual students can identify for themselves what their strengths are and how they attend, and then they are empowered to make better use of the information they receive.

By engaging students' metacognition or self awareness about their own brains and how they learn, teachers are creating a common language to discuss the different ways individuals receive information, how they organize and represent it. And how these ways of thinking and learning affect our perception and experience of the world (McGilchrist,2009). We are teaching students that it is necessary to question how information comes to us, and to monitor their own reception of information to make sure it is meaningful and useful to them.

This for me, is the crux of being Bright Brained. Knowing how to transform the information into the format that matches my strengths.  I am strongly visual, with a right hemisphere overview attentional style. When the information is coming at me in a stream of words, I have to quickly link them to pictures, or support that auditory input with the visual of written notes. But if I can't translate the verbal message quickly enough (it takes longer to translate words into pictures hence the slower processing speed of most if not all Visually dominant individuals), I may have to record the lecture or content until I can review it at my own rate and process it in my own time.

In fact, these are the top 5 strategies that I use most often in my work with students who are struggling in our heavily auditory and sequential, left hemisphere world:

1. Teach OVERVIEW first and repeatedly throughout a lecture to reorient the students to their big picture focus and the related overviews within that

2. Use CHUNKING, PATTERN recognition for memorizing; Engage metacognition/context/meaningful connections 

3. Encourage VISUALIZING and use of COLOR

• graphic organizers help visualize if information is highly sequential
• visualizing must be taught explicitly if individuals do not do it, but if the person is a visual thinker, then reminding and encouraging this strength in the midst of a heavily oral/auditory environment will help them connect emotionally and feel safe to learn from their strength.

4. Use MNEMONICS and SAME SOUND MEANING CUE for memorization

5. Engage EMOTIONAL CONNECTION to the teacher and content—relationship with the teacher is paramount

Once individuals are told about the hemispheres and their dominant skills, they can then begin to see which ones they use easily and which they are less conscious of and need to bring in more deliberately. This is where Cognitive Processing strengths enter the picture. 

In addition to teaching students about hemisphere specialization, I talk broadly about auditory and visual skills. I then link this to the notion of engaging our stronger skills at the moment of intake, when information is coming in, how can I represent it, so that I can easily and quickly process it and make sense of it.

So being Bright Brained is knowing your strengths as a learner and being empowered to transform and translate information into a format that is useable for you for maximum benefit. 

How do You make the best sense of information you receive? Do you have strategies that you use that are helpful when the presentation is primarily verbal? We'd love to hear your ideas. Share them here in the comments section.