Week Seven: Blog Question

What impact does hemispheric preference have on learning style?

Both left and right hemispheres of the brain are engaged in complex tasks but approach it in much different ways. Left brain monitors the areas for speech. It recognizes words, letters and numbers. It is analytical, evaluates factual material in a rational way, and detects time and sequence. The right brain gathers information more from images than words, looking for patterns, recognizes context of language, specializes in special perception and recognizes faces, places, and objects. These functions are rarely exclusive, and students use both sides of the brain while learning but one side is preferred. Their preference affects student’s personality, abilities, and learning style.

Teachers often teach the way they learned and use their own hemispheric preference. It is important to incorporate both hemispheric preferences for all students to truly grasp the context.
In society today, schooling seems to be left-brain dominated. They are run through time schedules, favor facts and rules and offer verbal instruction. Girls, who have been proven to be more left- hemisphere preference, feel more comfortable in this type of environment. Those who are right-hemisphere preferred, such as boys, feel more hostile towards schooling and prove to be more difficult in the classroom with discipline problems.

We need to teach the whole brain, and the entire classroom. One way to approach this is to deal with concepts verbally and visually. You can achieve this by writing key words, using diagrams showing the main ideas and their relations, or using a small excerpt video presentation and discussing the meaning. By using both visual and verbal techniques, students are more likely to understand the material.
Another approach is to design effective visual aids. How we position information should follow a pattern or a relationship with other concepts.
After teaching students the facts such as events in history ask students to think out of the box, become creative, and ask them thought-invoking questions like what if’s, or take a different approach with situations and have them make it their own.
Avoid conflicting messages and make sure your body language is in tune with your language.
Give options in testing and in completing assignments. Get out of the box and away from paper and pencil and creatively assess their knowledge using simulations, projects, and models.



What are the arguments for teaching the Arts?
How does art education develop cognitive growth?

Not one culture on this planet doesn’t have art. Art is a necessity for human experience and survival, therefore we should incorporate art into our educational curriculum.
- Art enhances the growth of cognitive, emotional, and psychomotor pathways.
- Schools are obligated to expose children to art.
- Learning the arts provides a higher quality of human experience.

Art develops cognitive competencies that benefit learners in every aspect of their education and prepare them for the demands of the 21st century.
- Perception of relationships: creating their own art, students recognize how parts of work influences each other and how they interact.
- An attention to nuance: The arts teach students that small difference can have large effects.
- Good things can be done in different ways and there are multiple solutions to questions and problems.
- Work in the arts help students recognize and pursue goals and can change goals in the process.
- In the absence of rules, you must use personal judgement and make a decision according to the situation.
- Art enhances the use of imagination and to visualize situations.
- Art allows students to invent ways to exploit constraints properly.
- Art helps students frame the world in new ways from an aesthetic perspective.

Art teaches life lessons in the classroom without defined structure or organization. Arts and science may seem like polar opposites but work hand in hand and only improve these abilities. The arts have proved to help SAT scores, reach students that were not otherwise being reached, improve self-concept, connects students, transforms the environment into a positive climate, challenges successful students, and connects learning experiences to the real world. Art is therefore essential to education and an important factor tying in all subjects and the student body.