Teaching Around the 4MAT Cycle Highlights

Type One Learners - Why

• They learn by feeling their experiences, being present to them
• take time to reflect and ponder their experience
• seek meaning and clarity
• learn primarily in dialogue
• many perspectives
• reflecting time
• seek commitment

They are great mentors build trust through personal interactions.

Favorite question: Why?

• Seek to know the underlying values.

Improve: Working under pressure and taking risks

Type 2 Learners - What

• They learn by thinking through experiences, judging the accuracy
• examining details and specifics
• take the time to
• They tackle problems with logic and analysis.
• build trust by knowing the facts and presenting them systematically.
• look for structure.
• judge new learning by how theoretically sound it is.
• monitor cutting-edge research in their fields.
• want to be as knowledgeable and accurate as possible.
• integrate their observations into what they already know, forming theories and concepts.
• excel in traditional learning environments and are thorough and industrious.

Favorite question: “What?” They seek to know what the experts know.

Type 3 Learners - How

perceive information abstractly at 6:00 and process it actively at 9:00. what can be done with what they learn.

• excel at problem solving
• get things done
• get to the heart of things

Favorite question: How does this work?” They seek to know the usability

Type Four Learners: What If?

perceive information directly at 12:00 and process it actively

• seek challenge and are risk takers
• They thrive on chaotic situations
• They excel at synthesizing
• They seek to influence others
• through self-discovery

Favorite question: What if. They seek to know the possibilities

The Cycle of Learning

• First we experience
• Then we reflect
• Then we conceptualize
• Then we act
  • We must try it, tinker with it, play with it, watch it, and make it work.
• Finally, We Integrate
  • We change it to suit us
  • we enrich it.
  • We place it in our world
  • we transfer it to where we live.
  • We adapt it, making something new of it.
  • We integrate it.
  • We are enriched by it.
  • And we are transformed.

Learners move from subjectivity, to objectivity, to integration

Renew thyself completely each day, do it again, and again, and forever again.

Reflection questions to think about yourself

• How much time do you spend experiencing the now, what is actually happening in the moment?
• How much time do you spend reflecting on what has happened?
• How much time do you spend thinking, examining, focusing on some aspect of what interests you intellectually?
• How much time do you spend acting, doing the things your day demands of you?
• Which parts of the cycle are your strengths?

The “I” of quadrant one

The teacher has connected the activity that is happening to the students’ past experiences. Responses are: “I know how that feels” or “I have been there myself.”

The “They” of quadrant two

• Master teachers make sure all the students get it.
• They tell it in multiple ways, they make it available in some form to be checked later by those who need to return to it in their own time, and they use visual as well as verbal forms to aid understanding.

The “It” of quadrant three

lead students to personal expertise that is useful to them for the rest of their lives.

The “We” of quadrant four

have students adapt learning to their world and to use it to influence their future.

Teaching around the cycles

Quadrant one - answering the “Why” question

Creating a sense of “I know something about this, and I want to know more”

• Personal, meaningful connections based on experience
• Sharing storytelling to correlate meaning
• Engaging in dialogue (no telling in Quadrant One, please), initiating conversations about the possible meaning of the material
• Seeing the material in context with some bigger idea or picture
• Listening and sharing similar experiences
• Speaking with subjective voices
• Gaining insights into their own experiences
• Experiencing camaraderie, having a sense of “having been there, too”
• Experiencing the diversity
• Experiencing the discrepancies
• connect to their lives
• Becoming aware of the value of learning

Questions they can answer

“Is there a larger context? “Why do I need to know this?” “Why is this material valuable in my life?”

Attention is the most basic form of love.” Get your students to attend; get them to love the learning!

Quadrant two - answering the “What” question

What do the need to know to master this content? essence pieces, the core concepts

What students experience

• Connecting fascination to facts
• Comprehending the learning
• Receiving expert knowledge
• pertinent information with the most salient facts
• Seeing both the big picture and the supporting details
• Blending personal experiences with expert knowing
• solid ground to further understanding

Quadrant three - answering the “How” question

Move from expert knowledge into personal skill and usefulness

Questions they can answer

• How will my students use this in their real lives
• How will this content affect their power

What students experience

• Learning important skills
• Practicing
• Experimenting
• the link between theory and application
• how things work
• Questioning
• Mastering skills
• Resolving discrepancies
• Reaching conclusions
• Extending the learning into usefulness in real-life

Quadrant four - answering the “If” question

They refine their use of what they have learned, integrating it into their lives.

What power will they have attained as persons?

What students experience

• Adapting the learning
• Modifying
• Summarizing
• Creating new questions
• Establishing future use
• Refining
• Creating new discrepancies
• Making new connections
• Evaluating
• Exhibiting, publishing
• Re-presenting
• Performing
• Sharing the learning

The act of creating is the act of the whole person. Bruner

Some important definitions

Emotion Connected to particular mental images that activate a specific brain system.

• Emotion in the brain produces feelings in the body.
• Emotions are public
• by and large people can observe one another’s emotions.

Feeling A representation of the changes in an organism induced by an emotional response.

• not the same as knowing a feeling, and reflecting on a feeling is yet another step up.
• feelings are private

Core consciousness A sense of self about the present, the here and now.

Thinking Organizing and manipulating new information with previous information in order to understand something. There is a major interaction between feeling and thinking.

Damasio’s (1999) list of how we come to know: “From observer, to perceiver, to knower, to thinker and then to actor.”

Learning Strategy preferences

Linear Processing

• Prefer verbal instructions
• Like controlled, systematic experiments
• Prefer problem solving with logic
• Find differences
• Like structured climates
• Prefer established information
• Rely heavily on the verbal
• Like discrete information recall
• Control feelings
• Are intrigued with theory
• Excel in propositional language
• Draw on previously accumulated information
• Seek routines, familiarity

  Linear processing words

• tell
• listen
• sit still
• read
• view
• discuss
• diverge
• define
• classify
• observe
• discriminate
• conceptualize
• develop coherence
• acquire knowledge
• test
• drill
• plan
• outline
• verify
• analyze
• reason
• identify
• research
• compare
• contrast
• theorize
• break into parts
• write analytically
• edit
• order
• select
• collect
• inquire
• predict
• record
• measure
• manage
• flowchart
• uncover
• hypothesize
• write an essay
• contradictions
• revise
• refine
• verify
• assess
• evaluate
• refocus
• produce
• conclude
• summarize
• come to closure
• take a position
• form new questions
• produce evidence

Round processing

• prefer demonstrated instructions
• like open-ended experiments
• prefer problem solving with hunching
• find similarities
• lile fluid and spontaneous climates
• need experiences
• excel in poetic, metaphorical language
• seek novelty

Round processing words

• reflect
• relate
• draw
• journal
• visualize
• imagine
• associate
• brainstorm
• create a mindmap
• simulate
• role play
• connect
• express
• interact
• pattern
• contrast
• feel tone
• write creatively or poetically
• cluster
• tinker
• hunch
• feel timbre
• feel nuance
• represent
• illustrate
• demonstrate
• relate to real world
• synthesize
• exhibit
• publish
• author
• create
• integrate
• experiment
• merge to a higher form

Teaching for the whole brain

• Using Metaphors and Similes - Creating metaphors reveals the essence of material
• Patterning - Find patterns in ideas, texts, and manner of visuals

Example: Create a record of how you spend your time, when you get home from school until you go to bed, for five school nights. Describe any pattern you see

• Using Imagery - Create pictures of concepts, relationships, and connections.
• Raising sensory awareness - Use techniques that call on auditory, visual, kinethetic, tacticle and olfactory senses
• Analogies - drawing, words or images
• Dramatics and Role Playing
• Three dimensional tasks

The complete 4MAT cycles

Quadrant One

Step 1: Connect

• relationship between learners and the content
• it connects to their own lives (not telling them how it connects, but having something actually happen in the classroom that will help them make the connection themselves)

Step 2: Attend

• what just happened
• attend to their own experience and to the
• how it went, what really happened

Allow students to reflect on the experience together, discussing, sharing, seeing similar patterns.

• establish a climate of trust
• students will become mentors to each other

Quadrant Two

The purpose of Quadrant Two is to inform and enlarge the learner’s understanding of the content, to answer the question “What?”

Step 3: Imagine

• You need your students to imagine, to picture the concept as they understand it and have experienced it, before you take them to the experts
• use analogies, metaphors, visuals
• “I already know something about this”
• Imagine: imaginen—to create a mental picture

Step 4: Inform

Inform: in forma—to bring form into

Quadrant Three

• to become skilled, to move to mastery
• to answer the question “How?”
• to learn by practicing.

Step 5: Practice

• become sufficiently skilled before they can innovate.
• begin to extend the learning into their lives
• practice the learning as the experts do it. this learning for themselves, be interpretive. The right mode’s ability to see possibilities, patterns, wholeness,

Practice: praktikos—capable of being used

Step 6: Extend

• Extend: ex tendere—to stretch out of
• to tinker, to see how it works for them,
• The right mode’s ability to see possibilities, patterns, wholeness, and roundness is a major asset here.
• They can make something of the learning for themselves

  Quadrant Four

  The purpose of Quadrant Four is to adapt, to create, to integrate the learning so it can be used by the students in their future, to answer the question “If?”

Step 7: Refine

• Other students can critique (students are often the best evaluators of their own work).
• The teacher suggests, helps with resources, offers.
• Have them move outside of their own extension, analyzing, improving, refining their work.

Step 8: Perform

• Look for originality, relevance, new questions, connections to larger ideas, skills that are immediately useful, values confirmed or questioned anew

Perform: per form—to form through, to shape, to mold, to fashion

Inform (to add form into) leads to Perform (to form through) in this culminating step.

Teaching from Concepts

A concept is a significant idea that relates to other significant ideas in a way that connects to the main body of content and creates meaning for students in their lives.

Like someone asks: What was that movie really about? “umbrella” their content, to identify the big idea that overarches content.

• the big idea might be something like “exploration.”
• this answer has cut through all the details

Can ask learners to examine all the instances of betrayal in the play and in their lives.

A topic is a subset of a concept, a smaller section of content that specifies the particulars.

An idea is a concept when it naturally connects: to learners, to content, and to other significant ideas.

Umbrella as a verb

You write the description of the content you hope to teach in the oval at the bottom of the page, as illustrated below, and then attempt to find the overarching idea and write it into the umbrella

Finding the Concept

1. Is that a significant idea?
2. Does it have potential for creating meaning in students’ lives?
3. What would happen if it didn’t exist? Would that be a problem?

Review Questions

Mapping of stages to actions

• Connect - The Connection (explain the concept)
• Attend - Sharing the connection from students to concept
• Image - Image that connects
• Inform - Information Delivery
• Practice - Skills practice
• Extend - The Learning used
• Refine - Critiquing the work
• Perform - Outcomes

For Inform and Practice

• How will your determine if they understood the lecture?
• What kind of practice will your require?
• Are there work pages or questions at the end of chapters?
• Are there skill and drill materials?

For intended outcomes - Perform stage

• What outcomes are you intending for students?
• What will they be able to do that they can’t do now?
• How will learners explain or perform their work?

The Connection (Connect Stage)

• What will you do to get your students excited about the material?

this is something that happens, something that intrigues them (a problem to solve), connects to them (a situation that has real meaning in their lives), or touches them in a way that links to their humanity.

Sharing the connection - Attend Stage

What discussion techniques will you use to give students the opportunity to share what just happened in the experience you created?

Will you ask them to list any commonalities they have discovered in their shared perceptions?

Will you ask the to list “hoped-for” outcomes

The Learning used (Extend Stage)

Take learning and do something with it, something that has meaning for them, not just something that is done to pass a test for school’s sake. This is where relevance is demonstrated.

What will they do to show and use their new understandings and new skills?

Critiquing the work (Refine Stage)

How will students edit and refine their unique use of the learning? Here they pause to reflect, merging their interpretive applications with “by the book.”

What procedures for feedback and mentoring?

The Image that connects

What is the nonverbal strategy you will use to have learners express their “pre-understanding” of the concept?

For example, if you are studying rebellion, have them draw a need to rebel. If you are studying decay, have them nonverbally express a lack of decay. If you are studying liberty, have them recite poems and play songs that express freedom.

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