BrainWare Safari

The idea that there is just one kind of intelligence, once widely accepted, has been replaced with a general understanding that people can be smart in a variety of different ways.  Today, we hear people say, “Oh, I’m a visual learner,” or “I’m an auditory learner.”  Some teachers will swear that they have students in their classrooms who learn physically or “kinesthetically.” Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning are the three that seem to have penetrated education vernacular.

Howard Gardner, known for his work in characterizing “multiple intelligences,” identified nine areas, including:

1. Logical-mathematical

2. Spatial

3. Linguistic

4. Body-kinesthetic

5. Musical

6. Intrapersonal

7. Interpersonal

8. Naturalistic

9. Existential

If what we mean by learning styles or intelligences are those cognitive skills and processes that our brains perform to help us maneuver, manage, understand and problem-solve in our world, then the number of learning abilities or styles may be far more numerous and complex.

Implications of Learning Styles

The concept of learning styles is that we can access information about our world in a variety of ways and then we can use a variety of ways to give it meaning, and then we can use a variety of ways to store and retrieve that information.  One important point about this multiplicity of styles is that we all possess all of them to greater or lesser degrees.  In other words, we may have a predominant or preferred style, but we still use the others. 

Experts on neuroscience as it applies to teaching and learning generally agree that interacting with information in multiple ways produces better (deeper, more lasting and more meaningful) learning than interacting with it in only one way.  Given that, it does not make sense to teach exclusively to a predominant or preferred learning style.  Rather it makes sense to help all students develop a variety of learning modalities and to include multiple modalities in learning experiences.

BrainWare Safari and Learning Styles

How many times have you heard someone say, “I’m just not good at math,” or “I can’t remember information I hear, I have to see it?”  The fact is that skills like logical thinking, auditory memory, and dozens of other mental processes don’t just happen – they develop in our brains through use and training. 

Whatever we are good at, we can probably get better.  And we can fill in our deficits.  We can do this because of “plasticity,” a term neuroscientists use to describe the brain’s ability to change and develop in response to our environments. 

BrainWare Safari helps build 41 different cognitive skills in the areas of attention, memory, visual processing, auditory processing, thinking, and sensory integration – the component processes our brains use to take in, perceive, understand, manipulate, store, retrieve and apply information in the world around us.