In his forthcoming ASCD book,A Teacher's Guide to Multisensory Learning: Improving Literacy by Engaging the Senses,Lawrence Baines provides educators with techniques for engaging students by using hands-on, visual, auditory, and olfactory stimuli.
Q. As part of ASCD's Whole Child Initiative, the Association calls upon educators to ensure that every student is "actively engaged in learning." How does using multisensory stimuli achieve this goal?
A. Several large-scale studies have revealed what a quick visit to a local high school will confirm—that most children above the age of 10 are bored at school. Multisensory strategies engage the senses and the mind as a matter of course, so students become involved in learning even if they were bleary-eyed when they first walked in the door.
Say you want to teach students the meaning of the wordmephitic. The traditional approach to vocabulary instruction would be to have students write "mephitic" three times, copy the definition from a dictionary (usually a hardbound book), and usemephitic in a sentence. When you analyze this approach from a sensory perspective, you realize that the student is being asked to self-instruct through almost pure abstraction and no guidance. Nothing is being taught. Students who are expert readers can handle abstractions with ease, so they usually breeze through such assignments. But they will not remember that mephitic means "foul-smelling" longer than necessary. Students who are poor readers will have difficulty copying the word on paper, let alone understanding its definition or using mephitic properly in a sentence.
In contrast, here's what a multisensory teacher might do: Have students think about and discuss what they consider to be the world's foulest odors. One student says, "Garbage;" another says, "A dead dog." The teacher and students say, "Mephitic," after each example. Then the teacher displays a wall-size poster of a pig farm and asks, "What does a pig farm smell like?" After students say, "Mephitic," the teacher writes MEPHITIC=FOUL-SMELLING in huge, red letters on the poster. Finally, the teacher takes the students out of doors, unleashes a fetid odor into the air (such as rotten eggs), and says, "Mephitic."
Although the time spent learning vocabulary is approximately the same in both conditions, students in the multisensory class—even the most oppositional and apathetic students—will likely retain the meaning of mephitic for the rest of their lives, whereas students in the silent seatwork environment will likely forget it, maybe even before the test on Friday.
Q. What would you say to teachers or administrators who would argue that using multisensory stimuli takes up too much instructional time?
A. Most instructional time should be multisensory. Multisensory teaching realizes the kind of academic learning time about which researchers have been writing for decades. On the other hand, the time a teacher spends in low-interaction, context-free, purely abstract assignments wastes incredible amounts of time.
I know a multisensory teacher in Florida who taught English to 9th graders in one of the poorest schools in one of the poorest counties in the state. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when he arrived, the scores of 9th graders on the state test on writing were so dire that the state issued a rating of "academically unacceptable." As the sole 9th grade English teacher, all students at the school had to take his class. After only one year of his multisensory teaching, the scores of freshmen at the school zoomed from the lowest quartile to the top quartile.
Q. In your book, you mentioned that this type of teaching meshes well with the Partnership for 21st Century Skills' outlined set of standards and outcomes. What 21st century skills can multisensory teaching methods help students gain?
A. The 21st century will belong to those individuals, organizations, and countries who successfully formulate innovative responses to increasingly complex problems. When teachers utilize multisensory strategies, they create experiences for students rather than make assignments. Few jobs in the future will ask students to quietly fill in a blank with a predetermined response. Thus, instructional techniques that promote docility, complacency, and obedience have limited value. The emphasis should be on cultivating intelligence and building constructive human relationships.
