Get ready to have your mind blown. Are you prepared? Get ready. Get settled for multimodal teaching!
Everyone does not learn in the same way.
Phew, I said it. Mind blown? Okay, probably not. But now that the truth is out in the open, I want to draw us in with the reminder that each day we breathe we are intaking and outputting information and communication. We are teaching, training, informing, supporting, and beyond. Information exchange upon information exchange moves back and forth between people, systems, environments, and more.
What does that mean when we may be working with visual learners, auditory learners, kinesthetic learners, verbal learners, written learners, or any other types of learners? How do we encapsulate all those learning needs during one session of information delivery? As a mental health therapist, how can I provide treatment to a group with various learning styles? How about a family session with multiple learning preferences? Ask the same question about yourself and the services you provide.
The answer: Multimodal efforts.
Multimodal teaching means we use a blend of approaches at one time or during one session, such as visual, kinesthetic, and auditory efforts, to engage the learner in a way that provides the highest likelihood that the information will be received, understood, and able to be retrieved and applied in different settings or environments. By using this method, you are providing a dynamic learning experience that keeps the person engaged by using a style or a combination of styles that is most “sticky” for information retention. And by ‘sticky,’ I mean it successfully sticks in the learner’s brain.
Time for some multimodal teaching examples:
In-Person Treatment
I openly confess that I take up a lot of space in the room. What this means is that I am often moving around in my chair, writing things on the whiteboard, walking around the room, using hand gestures, making visual facial expressions (sometimes over-exaggerated), asking for feedback, providing both open and close-ended questions, and, when needed and with permission, providing firm shoulder presses on clients when I notice their attention is drifting off or they need grounding.
I may have the client write on the whiteboard for me. Also, I may purposely provide inaccurate (low risk) information, so clients are pressed or prompted to correct me, question me, or advocate stronger for themselves. I may have clients create a scenario and practice aloud the conversation. I may purposely struggle to recall a word with the hopes that a client will state the word for me and briefly step into that “expert” role which strengthens confidence and self-esteem.
We may do brief writing assignments. I may have them relate information to songs they heard and messages they took away from the lyrics. I have shown an excerpt from a famous children’s cartoon, creating nostalgia while instructing them to identify the abuse highlighted in this episode, the messages it gave them in childhood, and how this relates to their adult behaviors. Also, I have held sessions outside to change environments, change the lighting, or modify the temperature in the room. We practice body language use, facial expressions, and nonverbal cues.
Virtual treatment
For the services I provide virtually, I incorporate at least three of these methods in each session or group: small group breakout discussions, short videos with captions permanently, short videos with the speed of the dialogue slowed, lessons led by peers, written exercises, screen shares, screen highlighting, peer engagement to scribe for the group, large group discussion, practice and role play, repetition, virtual whiteboard, encouraging peer feedback, asking for understanding of the information provided, assigning a client to support a new enrollee, verbal responding, written responding in the group or private chat, and also, starting each group with the highs and lows, or rose and thorn, or glimmer and trigger of each week.
They can answer this verbally, write it in the chat, write it on a piece of paper to share later, or talk-text the answer to me. I also use some of the in-person examples provided above.
Am I worried about information overload? No. This is because I’m not throwing the kitchen sink at clients (meaning using every possible approach imaginable). I’m just switching among a few methods each time a session or group is held. Suppose I only “talk at” the people I work with (auditory teaching). In that case, I’m missing opportunities to provide visuals, hands-on learning, and other methods that more closely connect with the learning styles of my treating and supporting.
Is it more work? Yes—but only at the beginning. Once you become comfortable with how to adapt, adjust, and modify your efforts to provide multimodal opportunities for learning, it simply becomes part of what you do naturally. And thus, more robust learning and therapeutic connections happen. Try it. Once you see the inevitable growth in clients, you’ll never go back to a one-size-fits-all teaching approach. Concerning multimodal teaching, you got this!
