Visual spatial learners, those who think in pictures not in words, make up about a third of every regular class with higher percentages among the gifted and culturally diverse, yet they are at risk in classrooms that focus on sequential learning, argues Dr Linda Silverman.
“There is a mismatch when someone who is very right hemispheric, who thinks in pictures, or in feelings or intuition, is in a highly structured left hemispheric school system,” says Dr Silverman, a licensed clinical and counselling psychologist from Denver, Colorado who is in Hobart for the biennial Tasmanian Association for the Gifted biennial conference, Igniting Talent: Toddlers to Teens to be held at Elizabeth College from Friday, September 6 to Sunday, September 7.
Dr Silverman says a structured school environment privileges step by step sequential learners, students showing their workings, doing things in a timely manner and students being able to demonstrate how they know something.
“In this system you must show your work otherwise you don’t know it, and you must know how to spell otherwise you’re illiterate, and you must have good handwriting, and you must be punctual otherwise you’re treated like a dummy,’ she says, ‘and right hemispheric children don’t fit well into to this type of thinking.
“The right hemisphere doesn’t have any sense of time; time is completely processed in the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere is the seat of our intuition but there’s not a lot of support for intuitive judgement in our education system,” she says.
Dr Silverman says the visual spatial learners must be nurtured as these are the students who go on to become artists, musicians, surgeons, research mathematicians, for example.
“They do amazing, marvellous, brilliant things but they are punished for it in school and are marginalised.”
In the past 33 years, Dr Silverman, who is director of the Institute for the Study of Advanced development, and subsidiaries, the Gifted Development Centre [www.gifteddevelopment.com] and Visual-Spatial Resource [wwwv.visualapatial.org], has studied more than 6000 children who have been assessed at the Gifted Development Centre.
Dr Silverman will offer four sessions during the conference, including two keynote addresses. The first, Through the Lens of Giftedness, will examine the challenges faced by the gifted in our population will be on Friday at 8.15pm. Gifted students number more than 9,300, 10 to 15 per cent of Tasmania’s school enrolments, most of them unidentified)
Her second keynote, Upside-Down Brilliance, The Visual-Spatial Learner, will be Saturday morning at 9.30am and will explore the visual spatial learner and how they are at risk in the classroom.
She will also offer a session for parents: If Our Child is So Smart, Why aren’t Our Lives Easier on Saturday at 1.25pm and a workshop for teachers, Strategies for Teaching Visual-Spatial Learners at 9.15am on Sunday.
More than 180 international, national and Tasmanian delegates will attend the conference which features about 34 sessions.
TAG, a non-profit volunteer run organisation, works to provide opportunities for the education of parents and teachers.
Places are still available for those who wish to attend part or all of the conference. Book your place at http://www.trybooking.com/CJRL, see more information at www.tasgifted.com.
TAG President Lynne Maher www.tasgifted.com
