Educators across the country constantly share with me the challenge of teaching students to write. Teachers tell me that some students dive into their essays with enthusiasm for translating their thoughts and knowledge into carefully constructed sentences, while most find writing tasks frustrating and daunting. For those that need extra help, research points to ways in which students can practice exercises that develop different functions of the brain. According to the lateralization theory, the ability to develop creative thoughts and organize them into linear ideas happens in separate hemispheres of the brain.1 Students can learn, through specified tasks, how to refine the skill of working cooperatively with the two halves of their brains when writing.
The Lateralization Theory
Studies in the 1960s revealed that the two hemispheres of our brain take on very different functions.2 The right brain is often random, creative and looks at the whole picture. Visual thinkers predominately think in pictures and use their right brain for other non-verbal activities. The left brain, however, is more analytical, sequential, logical and processes information verbally. The ability to exercise both hemispheres can be very helpful with the writing process.3 Educators can teach students to draw upon the appropriate hemisphere for different writing tasks. The following exercises target the right and left hemispheres of the brain independently, and can help students ease into writing with one task and one side of the brain at a time.
Right Brain Exercises to Improve Prewriting
Ask students to prewrite with a web of random ideas made of words or pictures around one nucleus idea. This activity taps into everything the right brain does best, allowing students to freely brainstorm and creatively visualize all of their ideas without concern for logic or order.1 Great Source‘s series of Reader’s Handbooks show excellent prewriting webbing examples in its chapters about the writing process. Teachers can also use Great Source’s Reader’s Handbook: Integration Guide for Inspiration®, developed in cooperation with Inspiration Software, to incorporate Great Source’s lessons for writing in Inspiration. This guide helps students brainstorm ideas visually in Inspiration, then drag their ideas around the screen and connect related concepts. These prewriting, visual tools help students brainstorm and organize ideas with the right brain, which prepare for the next step in the writing process – drafting an outline.
Left Brain Exercises to Improve Drafting
Once the diagram is complete, ask students to translate their images into verbal ideas, outlining their thoughts in a linear, logical way. Doing so transfers the process to the left brain, which specializes in sequential organization in verbal terms. If using Inspiration, students can toggle to Outline View, where they can add notes and organize their first draft of writing as the precursor to an essay.1
Understanding which hemisphere takes on each activity improves students’ work as they begin writing. Practicing these simple right brain and left brain tasks while prewriting and drafting for the writing process helps students target the correct half for the task.
Check back in next week to read “How to Reach Every Learner.”
Mona Westhaver
Inspiration Software, Inc.
- Holbrook, Emily. “Left Brain vs. Right Brain Teaching Techniques.” Funderstanding: Education and Training for Active Learners. Web. 09 Sept. 2010. <http://www.funderstanding.com/content/right-brain-vs-left-brain-2#more-513>. [↩] [↩] [↩]
- Vietti, Emily. “Left Brain vs. Right Brain Function in Learning.” Funderstanding: Education and Training for Active Learners. Web. 09 Sept. 2010. <http://www.funderstanding.com/content/left-brain-vs-right-brain-function-in-learning#more-488>. [↩]
- “Left Vs. Right Which Side Are You On?” Web. 09 Sept. 2010. <http://brain.web-us.com/brain/LRBrain.html>. [↩]
