Note: This entry continues the focus on the founding principles of Sustainable Teaching: Different students have differing profiles of cognitive strengths and weaknesses and recruit their strengths in order to solve problems; this means that people perceive problems differently and find different ways to solve them.

What?

Nico and Brooke are two boys with half a brain. After a hemispherechtomy to control severe seizures, Brooke retained only his right hemisphere and Nico his left, yet despite these traumas, both boys recovered and functioned well in school academically and socially. By studying how these boys defied predictions for a bleaker future, Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist now working at USC, hoped to learn more about how the brain works. Studying the adaptations of the two separated hemispheres would provide insight into the functioning of an intact brain.

In a paper she wrote on her work with Nico and Brooke (“A Tale of Two Cases”), she provided a general overview of a theory she developed based on her studies:

Brain development is coming to be viewed as an active, dynamic process, one in which a learner’s approach to problem solving may actually serve to organize his or her brain over time, and conversely, one in which a learner’s particular neuropsychological strengths may in turn shape his or her problem-solving approach.

. . . both boys have compensated for lost abilities by transforming processing problems they should not be able to deal with given their neurological profiles into qualitatively different problems that better suit their remaining strengths. Were this approach to hold true for other learners as well, it would imply that educators should think seriously about the problems they put to their students, and the various neuropsychological ways that these problems could actually be interpreted and processed. What we intend as a simple math exercise, for example, could in essence be a verbal problem to one child, a spatial problem to another, and even an affective or social problem to a third. As we could imagine, each of these children would be approaching the “math” problem from a very different angle that would have repercussions for their performance.

Immordino-Yang’s idea resonates with my recollection of a presentation I attended years ago—back in the ‘70s. The presenter created an image of a classroom as a place where many different languages are spoken. Teachers tend to understand and teach their discipline in one way—speaking one language. Those students whose way of understanding and approaching a problem coincides with the teacher’s way are likely to be successful with that teacher. Those who perceive and understand the world differently will struggle. In other words, teachers and students are frequently speaking different languages simply because they don’t perceive an assigned problem in the same way. And their differing cognitive strengths and skills shape not just their understanding of the problem but the solutions they will find.

Take two hypothetical examples:

A history teacher assigns a research paper to her juniors. The topic is Andrew Jackson and the significance of his policies. One student, Judy, has real analytic strengths. She has a knack for getting to the heart of arguments, and she is good at Latin and geometry. Her essay offers a strong analysis of Jackson’s policies and their significance for the country.

Bob is a politician-in-the-making; his social skills are very strong. Not only is he a leader in school government, but he shows real promise as an actor in school plays and is good at English, where his teacher praises him for his insights into character. His essay explores Jackson’s personal life and the significance of his policies as a reflection of his character.

It would be nice to believe that all teachers would see the merits in these two approaches to the assignment, would recognize the neuropsychological strengths that allowed Judy and Bob to see this assignment in two different ways. Alas, we know that this is not always so. If the teacher tends to be analytic (and many of us are), she is likely to approve of Judy’s approach and give it a higher grade than she gives Bob’s. If Bob is also a weak writer, the teacher might even fail to understand Bob’s approach and just become frustrated; she might meet with Bob and struggle to make him understand Judy’s approach—the approach the teacher wanted in the first place but never made clear.

A couple of years ago, as I read Robert Sternberg’s Successful Intelligence, I was struck by Sternberg’s description of an incident from his youth that also illustrates Immordino-Yang’s theory. He performed poorly on IQ tests and had very low spatial ability. Here’s what he wrote:

By the time I was in high school, though, a strange thing had happened. My scores on tests of spatial ability improved radically. … Or so it seemed. Had my spatial ability improved? Not really. It was no better than it had been years before. But I had come to realize that many spatial-ability problems on these tests can be solved verbally rather than visually. In other words, instead of trying to visualize what, say, a set of forms would look like in another spatial position, I tried to talk the problems through to myself. I would describe the figures verbally and then try to match that description with the answer options.

It’s a wonder any of us can communicate at all, isn’t it?

What makes communication especially difficult are teachers’ assumptions that their students speak the same language. All they have to do is talk a bit louder and more slowly, and they can get even the slowest students to understand and solve problems as they do. Perhaps we can draw a helpful lesson from Nico and Brooke: Careful examination of students’ solutions to a problem can reveal how they perceived the problem in the first place and can provide insight into their cognitive strengths. Teachers can learn the languages of their students.

(To learn more about the study of Nico and Brooke, read “A Tale of Two Cases” by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, published by Mind, Brain, and Education and available in the Sustainable Teaching Forum library.)