What’s Right Brain Learning?

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Right brain learning focuses on the right hemisphere of the brain, which is more holistic and intuitive. It is aimed at students who are right-brain dominant and may struggle with traditional teaching methods. Right-brain learners benefit from visual aids and concrete learning, but may struggle with abstract concepts.

Right brain learning is a type of learning, or teaching, that seeks to focus primarily on the right hemisphere of the brain. This type of learning is typically aimed at students who are either heavily right brain oriented or who are left brain oriented and need training to strengthen the right side of their brain. While people are typically not completely left or right brain oriented, most people have a dominant cerebral hemisphere, just like most people have a dominant hand. Right-brain learning usually seeks to target the right hemisphere of the brain to help those who are naturally right-brain dominant learn more effectively.

The terms “right brain learning” and “right brain” do not refer to “right” as in “correct” but instead refer to “right” in spatial terms and refer to the side of the brain that is physically on the right side of the person. There is no “correct” or “correct” side of the brain, so right-brain learning isn’t better or worse than left-brain learning—they’re just different and worth mentioning to better understand how people learn. This is especially important for teachers and students to understand, so that each can better facilitate a student’s learning.

Right brain learning is typically more holistic and intuitive, often non-verbal in nature and therefore can be challenging in a traditional classroom. Holistic in this sense means that a right-brain student is more likely to learn the material best when first introduced to the overall idea or concept, and thus to learn about the parts that make up that whole. For example, a class might commonly learn the grammar parts of speech, punctuation, and sentence structure, then learn how the sentence comes together. Right brain learning would probably be best facilitated by learning the entire sentence and then breaking the whole into separate parts.

Similarly, right-brain learning is often intuitive and non-verbal, meaning that many right-brain learners have a “lived” sense of right or wrong about a problem, but may not be able to explain why without much effort. This type of student is also often best served through visual aids and other forms of instruction in addition to oral lessons. A right-brain student is also usually better at random, concrete processing, rather than sequential or abstract learning.

This means that right-brain learning can use random understanding and knowledge, rather than working from the beginning to the end of a lesson. A right-brain student will eventually come to understand the whole subject, but may start halfway through and move on before figuring it all out. The student is also more likely to learn concrete and real things better than abstract concepts that are more symbolic. A right-brain student may have trouble with algebra and language, which are abstract; but he will often excel in geometry or music, which are real and immediately meaningful to him or her.




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