The Jammie Dodger School

“Oh yes, we do VAK”.

This is not the sort of sentence that you would hear in a school even just a few years ago but one that I am hearing on a far more regular basis these days as I go round the country.

Yet, whenever I hear these words my joy at meeting teachers who know what VAK is let alone use it is always joined with a nagging feeling somewhere deep down in my brain that I have only just been able to put my finger on - figuratively speaking.

But, first things first, let’s go back to VAK. For the uninitiated, VAK refers to one of the ways of looking at a learner’s individual learning styles and catering for it in the classroom. When we take information on board it comes through to our brain through our five senses but we don’t tend to use smell or taste for learning (“OK children, tongues out for the literacy hour”).

What that leaves is information coming to us through our eyes, through our ears or by moving or doing – visual, auditory or kinaesthetic.

We have a preference for the way in which we take information on board and we seem to learn better when we learn using our preference. In your classroom then what are the opportunities for ensuring that you play to everybody’s learning preference at least once during the lesson. Even from a memory point of view this makes sense as our memory for pictures is stored in a different part of our brain from our memory for sounds. Even verbs and nouns are stored in different places in our heads. We even have a “muscle memory”. Ask someone how to tie a tie or which pedal the clutch is and watch how they do it!

Using all three in the classroom means everybody gets that chance at least once to play to their strengths as well as making sure that they all also get the chance to work on their weaknesses as well as use three memory channels as opposed to just one or two.

It’s worth pointing out here that we tend to teach according to the way we prefer to learn with the unspoken implication being, “it’s good enough for me, what’s wrong with you”.

VAK is just one of a whole number of strategies and techniques that form part of a more enlightened, brain-friendly approach to helping more children learn more, more of the time. Combine it with understanding about Multiple Intelliegences Theory (not how clever are you but how are you clever? You have at least eight intelligences to draw on in the classroom if not more from logical/mathematical and verbal/linguistic to musical and naturalistic).

Throw in some memory strategies (given that we forget around 80% within 24 hours research shows that if we review for a few minutes at the end of a lesson, then after 24 hours, again after a week, after a month, after six months we can improve our recall by as much as 400%).

Add some whole brain learning techniques such as Mindmaps ™ combining pictures and colour as well as words and spice it up with a spot of Brain Gym and we are now beginning to approach a 21st century learning-based classroom.

And an increasing number of schools, both primary and secondary are starting to do this with many, many benefits for both students and teachers being reported including improved motivation of both staff and learners, breakthroughs with difficult children and a lot more fun had by all.

But still this nagging feeling in the back of my head despite schools taking on board the very things I and others have been advocating for several years now.

And then one day, as is so often the case, the answer just came to me (although not usually whilst eating a Jammie Dodger as was the case this time).

Picture the biscuit in question – biscuity bit round the edge, jammy bit in the middle in the shape of a heart, don’t know where the dodger bit is.

So many schools were beginning to get the biscuit – “Oh yes, we do VAK” – but there was something missing. The jammy heart. You can apply as many strategies as you like but a real commitment to helping young people learn involves far more than a tick list of techniques. If you only have biscuit on your jammy dodger it makes for a dry old biscuit.

The necessary jam in your learning biscuit involves aspects such as self-esteem, expectations, unconditional love, beliefs and hope amongst others.

By the way, to find out more about Jammie Dodgers just click here. You'll be amazed how much stuff is out there about such a little biscuit.

To go to Ian Gilbert's profile please click here.