Are learners who receive 4MAT Designed teaching recognizing how they learn, what they value, and possibly who they are becoming? Read on and see.
Each 4MAT Quadrant offers unique opportunities to discover some of who we are, not just to create curiosity, but particularly to ponder the experiences that go more deeply into our hearts.
Such moments trigger a wonder about how we came to have a certain awareness, a sudden recognition of already knowing something, but not being sure of how we know, an insight struggling for the right word.
Somehow we collated, combined and recognized an essence of something intrinsic to ourselves, a compelling quality, part or core of who we are that is doing the recognizing. Such moments are gifts of Self-knowledge and ongoing curiosity. If you are designing learning experiences, your goal is to help your learners have such moments often.
Finding your Self is such a worthwhile task, but I’l admit it is a moving target indeed, searching for ourselves with ourselves. Yet teachers and trainers who believe that traveling the 4MAT cycle affords a golden opportunity for Self discovery, are beginning to understand what it takes. Somehow, through experience, reflection, and meaning-making, we begin to recognize qualities that are part of us.
This series of four blogs with strategies for each of the four quadrants will help to clarify how meaning and its effect on Self awareness happens with the use of 4MAT Cycle Design. You can become one of those teachers who does this often.
Feeling experiences bring meaning to learners. Subjectivity is what remains with us when we learn. Design experiential happenings that connect personally.
Create experiences where learners can feel and take their subjective feelings with them to the objectivity following in the Quadrant Two content information.
It is no small task to create group experiential tasks for capturing the concept essence of the content. It requires a teacher to not only conceptualize well, but to know learners equally well enough to know what will capture their feelings.
When this succeeds, everyone’s awake! Your learners, because of the quality experience you created has struck their authenticity, and you yourself, because such authentic discussions are the magic of learning and listening with heart.
Remember how Quadrant One uses both Maestro, Right Feeling and Navigator, Left Sharing.
1. Treat subjectivity as the ground from which meaning comes. Think that way.
2. Create an experience that forces first person awareness.
3. Use Active dialogue like “remember a moment when…”
4. Have learners share perceptions.
5. Evoke image remembering of certain similar situations.
6. Ask for personal reactions, both feeling and intuiting, to the concepts you are teaching. Hitch intuition requests onto your feeling experiences.
7. Think relational connections, wholeness, embrace living connections.
Question: What part of the Self then does Quadrant One aim for?
Answer: Meaning and personal value, wakening a sense of deeper grounding in self-identity, calling fort the gest in each learner, a worthwhile goal indeed.
Stay tuned for finding the Self in Quadrant Two in Blog #2 next week.
