Teaching Tip: Slow Down to Go Fast
Here is a teaching tip from me, as a person with nonverbal learning disorder (NLD or NVLD), also called developmental visual-spatial disorder (DVSD). NVLD means that my nonverbal skills, such as visual-spatial skills, are not as good as my verbal skills. When I took dance classes, it took me longer to memorize the dances. When I learn other multi-step skills that one learns by watching someone else, it takes me longer to learn those skills. I call these skills “visual-procedural skills.”
Often in the dance classes, the teachers would demonstrate too many steps at a time at too fast a speed for the steps to enter my memory. Then they would have us practice it over and over again, and they may have thought it was impossible to practice the dance that many times without memorizing it solidly. The catch is that I needed the teacher to show me the dance slowly and with fewer steps at a time, so the dance could enter my memory in the first place.
Then, to keep the dance in my memory, I could have practiced it at home. The teacher could have spent about the same amount of time helping me practice the dance by teaching it more slowly in the first place, and then expecting me to practice it at home to keep the memory, and I would have been more ready for the performance.
If the teacher wanted to teach it slowly and then have us keep practicing it in class to practice the technique and expression, that is fine, as long as they do in fact teach it slower at first.
Sometimes, I felt the way someone might feel if a teacher had shown them a fast-forwarded video of a dance, many times, and then expected the student to be able to perform it because, well, they’ve seen the video many times, haven’t they?
Of course, teachers of dance and other visual-procedural skills don’t always have enough class time to teach the dance at the speed that every student needs. Sometimes it might be more practical for the teacher to give the student an accommodation, such as a video that they can use to learn the dance at home.
In that case, it will be helpful if the teacher gives the video to the student before they demonstrate the skill, so the student will not fall behind the other students. This kind of accommodation is called frontloading. It will also help if the teacher makes a verbal note of anything in the sequence of steps that they would like the student to do differently from the way it was shown on the video.
However, if you want to tailor your teaching for a live for a student with a challenged short-term visual memory, it may be more efficient in the end for you to teach the sequence of steps slowly enough for the student to get it into their memory in the first place. Slow down to go fast.
Thanks,
Julia
P.S. I am curious to read comments from any folks who have learning disabilities other than NVLD about whether the principle of slowing down to go fast applies to students with other combinations of strengths and challenges.
