Neurotypical, Neurounique, and Narrative Learning
1. Neurotypical learners: About 60 percent of public school kids graduate high school from a traditional one-size-fits-all education, where typical auditory and rote learning methods are common and based on lectures, taking notes and memorizing facts. But the drop out rate across the country at the time ranged between 40 and 60 percent. I recognized that many of my too-bright students had been in schools not designed for those with a different neural landscape and yet they tried to “fit” into the way classes were taught. They weren’t failures, but without choice, school systems were failing so many children. There was nothing left for them but to drop out of school.
Watching a TED Talk back in 2010 I heard the word “neurotypical” for the first time. Something clicked, I put the talk on pause and took notes feverishly. I started running word permutations in my head looking for the right term to describe the genius class kids I’d experienced over my 39 years in the classroom who were the opposite of neurotypical.
As I thought about my first students at Foothill High who had been expelled or kicked out of their traditional high schools in Pasadena the word NeuroUnique flashed into my thinking! That was exactly the word I needed to describe my students, they were Neurounique, the opposite of neurotypical and since schools were not designed for them, they were often found in trouble or worse, they were forced out of school. I found them to be exceptional classroom assets and capable of exciting other students into rousing discussions that lifted the entire class.
Definition: When I coined the term neurounique, I had in mind students who learned in ways not honored in traditional schooling. They learned “outside the box”, in ways that were beyond neurotypical. Some were kinesthetic learners who learned best when lessons included movement connected to the lesson, some were intuitive, while others were dominated by a “social/emotional” learning style. I had just learned about integrative learning understood that these kids needed it, and were not getting it. That explained everything.
They asked insightful, brilliant questions. Such smart kids, why had they been kicked out of school? When I searched their school records, I found the opposite of what I expected. I had two to three times the number of gifted students populating my classes. So why had they not been getting straight A’s? Education was a one-size-fits-all operation with the belief that all kids learned the same way. I’d only been teaching a few weeks but I’d already seen that not all kids learned by rote learning. They were not neurotypical. From class discussions, I saw that these kids were in possession of a highly evolved sense of justice, but why? Were they were too smart for their own good? These questions would shape my career as a teacher. So why had they been kicked out of school and how did they come to be in possession of such an advanced sense of justice. Was I among future Supreme Court judicial minds? With the data in hand (triple the number of gifted students in my classes) these questions launched me on a quest for answers that took me first to the school principal, the district's gifted coordinator and to the superintendent of schools. None knew that so many gifted kids had been expelled from school, none had any answers to my ticklish questions. Then came a epiphany, hadn't I heard there was Masters in Gifted Education at a nearby university? Off I went.
At California State University Los Angeles, I found a graduate program created by Dr. Barbara Clark where I could get a master’s degree in Gifted Education. She was writing her landmark text Growing Up Gifted which she based on actual classroom experiences. As one of her graduate students with students of our own, she capitalized on our vast collective classroom experience to inform the architecture of her book based on brain research.
2. Neurounique learners on the other hand excel when 4 or more learning modalities are integrated into the architecture of learning. Kinesthetic, emotional, intuitive, and cognitive experiences are at the foundation of learning.
3. Narrative learners. The best foundation for long term memory is built on story telling. Around a campfire, Cheyenne grandparents tell the story of Jumping Mouse, a teaching myth, to their grandchildren. The story teaches a sacred value to the next generation about “giving away”, the importance of sharing even when you have little. Jumping Mouse is a chapter in Seven Arrows, a book by Hyemyohsts Storm that was controversial amongst Cheyenne elders because it revealed sacred powers to non-indians.
A small book mark fell from a book I was reading. On it was printed a bar code and an unusual reference to size from a clothing package.
Instead of large, medium, or small, it read:
“SIZE: One size fits all.”
Sounds alot like the way most classrooms have been historically organized under a belief that:
“all students learn the same way.”
It’s a flawed basis for education since there is no “one way to teach all children.” Beginning with the industrial age, schools also became assembly lines with kids coming off conveyor belts like cars exiting the end of Ford’s Model A Assembly building. Like Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, the architecture of learning historically has only worked for about 60% of all the kids in school, which explains why the drop out rate dial swings between 40% and 60%. What about the kids who have different ways of learning, different neural landscapes?
Some of us weren’t cut out for assembly line schooling. I discovered during my first year of teaching that my classes boasted two to three times the rate of gifted students. Since Foothill High School was a school for drop outs, such a high incidence of bright kids seemed like a contradiction. They asked such brilliant questions, I was puzzled as to why they hadn’t been successful in school. That’s when I met Chucky Thomas.
Next outing, in sun's setting light, look for people who pause to cast westward their vision. It's not that the sun is setting as much as it is that the horizon is rising. As long as I can remember when seeing westward gazers at sunset, I habitually turned round to see what it was that they were not seeing.
So too, in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, published the same year I stepped into the classroom, did Abraham Maslow. In 1968, he wrote: "It is as if Freud supplied us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half." Maslow turned round to see what all other psychologists did not see. He shown floodlights on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to examining their deficits. He studied the farther reaches of our nature.
From this genesis did I carry forward a new vision into the classroom. Across the arc of my teaching career it became my mission to find in each child what others did not see.
Maslow died two years later, but the torch of his far reaching human nature continues to carry on through my colleagues, students and their students. In my dreamscape I wish that you too seek the best in those whom you encounter, that which others cannot see.
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