Quick

Banner for Light on Learning featuring a lightning bolt across a dark blue background

Reach & Teach©

How Much Do We Learn?

It is important that we use research-based methods for facilitating a student's learning. As we can see from The Learning Pyramid, the best method to use is hands-on activities followed by having students teach each other.

In Lee's classroom, who spent more of our time doing hand-on activities as well as having students teach the lessons.

Lee speaks on "Best Practices to Engage Students." Learning is best accomplished when the student is open to the experience. This openness comes from the teacher or facilitator "sparking the interest" of the learner. Recognizing and using Learning Styles and now Learning Systems helps us to reach and teach students. In fact, our "teaching" is really providing an effective learner-centered environment.

It is important to understand Learning Styles. We each have preferences. Often, teachers best teach in their own learning style. However, the concepts of left-brain and right-brain thinking as well as learning styles are considered passe. The new term is "Learning Systems."

Here is a list of the best-known styles:

	auditory and emotional feeling - musical and loves words, called "The Music Lover"
	interpersonal, called "The Socializer"
	intrapersonal, called "The Individual"
	kinesthetic and hands-on, called "The Mover"
	linguistic, called "The Word Player"
	logical/mathematical, called "The Questioner"
	naturalist - field studies and data
	visual and spatial, called "The Visualizer"

The Systems are known as:

	emotional - vacillating between positive and negative - comedy helps here
	social - learning in community with others
	cognitive - analysis and problem solving
	physical - hands-on
	reflective - experiments and exploration

It is easy to see these are related.

All learners should be mastering the following skills (among many others). The method used can be implemented according to learning styles or ways of thinking.

	Bloom's Higher Order Cognitive Skills
	Categorizing and Classifying
	Communicating effectively
	Comparing
	Completing long-term projects
	Completing mazes, puzzles
	Comprehending graphs, tables, maps, symbols, and meanings from drawings
	Cooperating
	Distinguishing among choices
	Explaining
	Exploring
	Imagining and dreaming
	Interviewing
	Keeping time
	Mediating conflicts
	Memorizing
	Observing
	Organizing events
	Problem Solving
	Processing knowledge
	Recording
	Reading maps and charts
	Reasoning
	Relating
	Remembering melodies
	Retelling
	Rhythm, melody, music
	Sharing
	Speaking, Listening, Reading
	Summarizing
	Supporting opinions with details and proof
	Touching, moving, interacting with space
	Visualizing
	Working in cooperative and collaborative groups
	Working in self-paced
	Working independently
	Working with illustrations and with abstract patterns and relationships

The Life Vehicles and The Behavior Modes^TM

Meet some of the characters Lee developed in the early 1980s for use with students attending The Lee Gabor Academy. You can click on the thumbnail for a larger graphic. All characters are trademarked properties and may not be reproduced without permission.

Using child-like graphics helps students to better understand the parts of the self that are developing. Also, these characters helped students take responsibility for themselves rather than blaming others or issues over which they held no control.

The Life Vehicles are (respective to graphics): emotional, intellectual, physical, and ethical or awareness of controlling the other three.

The Life Vehicles - "Quick, Smart, EZ, & Aware"™

Lee's belief is that we humans are a combination of four emphases: emotional, mental, physical, and ethical. The mental is cognitive and deals with facts and data. The emotional self drives our lives. The physical self is on this planet to survive and experience. It is these experiences that "grow" our emotions and intellect. The ethical self is developed by our having the courage to do the right thing at the right time in the right way and for the right reason. At this point, we begin to lessen the personal ego and see how we can contribute to making the world a better place. As we think about these, we can see the relationship between them and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Each of the Life Vehicles can be out-of-balance and manifest as either of two extremes. Upon seeing graphics of the two extremes, Lee's students immediately began to recognize when they were becoming out-of-balance.

The Behavior Modes - "Apt, Tie-and-Wrap, and The Scrap Twins"™

The three Behavior Modes show the steps we take to accomplish a task. First there is a seed or aptitude (or interest). We either continue with this or we let it go. In Bloom's, this is where we gain knowledge, however small that bit of information may be.

If we continue, we do the task. This is where we tie-and-wrap it into something specific. This is where we find our comprehension and application steps in Bloom's. At this point, we will either keep this as the all-in-all or we will move to the next step, which is to analyze and evaluate our action or what we have produced.

This last step is represented by The Scrap Twins. One twin is our scrap book and the other our scrap or trash bag. This means we keep the parts that are relative and let go of what we no longer need.

It is very important that we teach our children to do this third step. This is what leads to higher order thinking. This represents the analysis, synthesis, and evaluation steps in Bloom's Taxonomy.

When as combine QSE&A with The Behavior Modes, we arrive at a 12-step process that works with any task. Lee provides as 12-Step program that goes into detail regarding these steps. She is strongly involved in philosophy and developed these characters to better explain universal concepts.