An interesting learner I've known.... is Jordan. Funny thing is I ran into Jordan today at the Sonic drive through. And other than asking how he was these days, I asked one other question. A question about how Jordan learns. Well, I guess it's a question about how Jordan thinks and lives. I asked, "So, how's basketball?".
Jordan was in my 8th grade Algebra I class. He was also the star player for our middle school basketball team. Jordan was the epitome of what a student athlete should be, he was student and then an athlete, and he was good at both.
Naturally intelligent with a solid mathematical foundation, most topics we covered he already had a strong grasp of. So, I didn't realize how warped his thinking/ learning was for a while. Simply showing Jordan how to do the problems didn't work for him. Verbally explaining to Jordan, how to do the problems didn't work. Letting Jordan manipulate tiles didn't work. It was during this section of coursework (the part that Jordan didn't already know) that I realized I had to figure out what WOULD work for Jordan. I was despirate to get to Jordan. It wasn't until was attempting to explain something that had NOTHING to do with academics, that I made some leadway with Jordan learning something. I compared it to basketball. Then the next time I had to attempt to explain something to Jordan I tried it again. So when it came time for Jordan to learn about factoring, for Jordan it was factoring basteball style. Order of Operations wasn't the normal Please Excues My Dear Aunt Sally. It was Passes Eventually Make Dunks And Scores. I had to show him how I did the problem. Let him tell me what he saw me do. And then we had a convo about how it could relate to basketball. And when it started to happen, we started discuss his English Language Arts work. And if his ELA teacher let him re-explain it to her or she explain it to him basketball style, he got!
So, maybe for some it visual, musical, spacial, or auditory. For Jordan, it's basketball (sportial).
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2 comments:
Sportial... you need to copyright that word!!
Differentiated instruction at it's best!
One of my favorite professors was Dr. Charlie Schadd. This was back in the day before middle school majors. He was the crazy middle school teacher/advocate in the education department.
He constantly repeated that in order to teach middle level learners you have to first meet them at their level and then take them as far as you... as fast as you can.
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