{"id":309499,"date":"2018-05-23T11:38:51","date_gmt":"2018-05-23T18:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/?p=309499"},"modified":"2018-05-23T11:38:51","modified_gmt":"2018-05-23T18:38:51","slug":"no-one-is-just-an-auditory-kinesthetic-or-visual-learner-best-teaching-practices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swimmingworldmagazine.com\/news\/no-one-is-just-an-auditory-kinesthetic-or-visual-learner-best-teaching-practices\/","title":{"rendered":"No One Is Just An Auditory, Kinesthetic, or Visual Learner; Best Teaching Practices"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leadership Lanes by Toni Armstrong\u00a0<\/em>(A Multi-Part Series Presented by Swimming World).<\/p>\n

Teaching to one learning style handicaps the learner from fully comprehending their experience because no one is a single learning style.<\/span> <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

All coaches are familiar with learning modalities\u2014kinesthetic, auditory, and visual\u2014and it is common practice to gear a lesson towards the dominant modality of the student. \u00a0If you were trying to teach a more efficient catch in freestyle, you would describe the catch to the auditory learner, demonstrate it to the visual learner, and manually manipulate the arm of the kinesthetic swimmer.\u00a0 It is quite unfortunate that this is a very common approach to teaching an athlete, because this approach is wrong. In fact, this approach will handicap a swimmer\u2019s learning abilities in the future.<\/p>\n

Modern brain-based research indicates that everyone possesses the abilities to learn kinesthetically, auditorily, and visually, and that our modalities exist together on a continuum. \u00a0We may identify a swimmer as dominantly kinesthetic, but that doesn\u2019t mean that they are only a kinesthetic learner or that audio and visual won\u2019t work as well.<\/p>\n

Take a swimmer that is 75% kinesthetic, 15% visual, and 10% auditory. When you teach them solely through a kinesthetic process, you only reaching 75% of their learning capacity. Teaching them through all three modalities not only reaches 100% of their learning capacity, but it reaches the dominantly auditory and visual learners too. In essence, teaching to all modalities kills two birds with one gigantic bazooka.<\/p>\n

Learning strengths change based on experiences, needs, and age. \u00a0We have all heard of critical windows; they exist based on our physiological development. \u00a0Dr. Maria Montessori\u2019s<\/strong> early discoveries of teaching windows drove her creation of the Montessori Method. \u00a0She argued that ages 0-6 were critical windows for developing language, while 6-12 were windows for moral, social and mental independence.<\/p>\n

These theories were written in the early 1900\u2019s and still hold true to today\u2019s research; they support the argument that learning strengths change along with our physiological development. \u00a0If we only use one way to connect with the athlete, we are prohibiting their other strengths from developing. This could handicap future athletic development during future critical windows.<\/p>\n

And here is the kicker: there are more than 3 learning modalities<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Dr. Howard Gardner<\/strong>, professor of education at Harvard University, argues that we have the capacity to learn through at least 8 different methods he identifies as Multiple Intelligences:<\/p>\n