More on Eide Neurolearning Blog and Learning Styles

Response to Bill Gates from Derek's Blog brought up this thread again. A new comment posted by pepper to Eide Neurolearning Blog raised and commented on the practice of assigning time slot for different subjects.

Where in the real world do we think exclusively about math, band, history, and art in 90 minute mutually exclusive chunks on Monday, only to think about English, marketing, and physics in equally exclusive chunks?

This is "industrial age production line concept" practice puts to the best use. By using equal time slots with distinct subject matter, teachers' allocation, class allocation and resource allocation are optimized - at least on paper.

Unfortunately, management efficiency here is killing the very essence of the purpose of the education. Some children have difficulties with such time switching as described by Drs Eide.

in our practice helping kids with learning challenges we see large numbers of children, especially in the early grades, who have difficulties transitioning from one subject to the next, and find the present "fifteen minutes and switch" pattern in the early grades to be absolute torture. This is especially true of children with "autism-spectrum" type or sensory integrative problems, which seem to be on the rise. Going to a more flexible "bell-less" world would be a tremendous boon for these kids, especially.

Pepper suggested,

meaningful integration, a minimum of an inter-term where small groups of 8-10 students tackle real-world, and thus interdisciplinary, problems, maybe even with an adult facilitator from the "real world."

Drs Eide further elaborated,

We gave a talk last fall to the National Association For Gifted Children where we talked about the need to provide a more historically and real-world grounded context for education in all subjects, to help students come to view the acquisition of knowledge as a means confronting problems in real world--that is, tying the teaching of conceptual developments in science and math, technology, government, art, etc., together more closely with the historical circumstances that led to them. The kind of groups you describe would be ideal for that: "Suppose you were all a bunch of 4th century B.C. Athenians..." or "15th century A.D. Chinese" and really living entirely in that environment at school for a few weeks at a time. The opportunities for problem solving and learning are immense.

That brings me back to an undergraduate business/commerce curriculum I heard about during the first "League of Worlds" conference last year. The complete curriculum is designed around a "virtual island" where the students play the role of different businesses and officials on the island. The scenario gives the students context to learn the principles of the subject.