"Whole to Part" or "Part to Whole" Learners

[domestic_engineer]

How do you tell whether your child is a "whole to part" or a "part to whole" learner?  Are there classic, tell-tale signs?

How long did it take you to "figure out" your child's learning style?

[EmilyGF]

I figured out my daughter was a whole-to-parts learner when her spelling actually got worse with All About Spelling. 

When she has parts-to-whole curricula, it is like she turns off her brain. She considers it prechewed, doesn't do any work on it, and goes crazy (acts up, etc). She loves reading and figuring things out.

 

We dumped our parts-to-whole math, too, and she is doing so much better. 

 

Emily

[Farrar]

I think it's a useful lens for thinking about things... but I'd be careful about being too tied to any one lens for thinking about learning "styles." A lot of the stuff around it is a bit bunk. Most kids will benefit from getting a little of both approaches. For example, doing some big picture meaning stuff with math manipulatives and discovery based questions and also sitting down to drill math facts sometimes. Most kids aren't going to thrive doing just one or the other. And some subjects may do better with more whole to parts or parts to whole while others are the opposite.

 

So look for the balance that's right for your kids. Just try different things. And if something doesn't work, you can say, oh, that was very visual, very whole to parts, etc. etc. and that can help steer you toward a different approach instead of rehashing the same thing just with different materials.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Farrar

[Targhee]

My first revelation on this topic was with my spouse, who is whole to parts. He didn't even realize it himself until we had a discussion after I read Cynthia Uleich Tobias's book The Way They Learn. I honestly just thought that he was a bit sloppy with details, rather than considering it a strength in its own right, complimentary (that definitely at odds some times) with my own perspective.

 

My second revelation was learning that global (whole to parts) and analytic (parts to whole) learning styles are not strictly binary - you don't use one at the exclusion of the other. I am predominantly analytic, but I switch perspectives often. I think encouraging both ways of seeing the world is healthy, for understanding other people, and a strength in your own work/learning.

 

My third revelation about these learning styles was that they were only one way of looking at learning style - one dimension in a multifaceted complex of what we call individual learning style. Knowing and understanding other learning style dimensions and to an extent personality traits gives you a better picture of who your child is, how they learn, what they need, and how to facilitate their education.

 

Figuring out your child's learning style is like putting together a puzzle - it happens in degrees and there's no right or wrong order (or time frame) for doing it. Also, sometimes developmental stages make a certain aspect of learning style appear dominant, but because it is related with universal development and not individual learning style it will change. That wasn't worded clearly, but it's late and I'm not thinking fluidity.

 

I think the whole-to-parts (global) vs parts-to-whole (analytic) point comes up frequently on WTM boards is that WTM, its products, and many other classical curricula are heavily analytic, leaving parents of global a feeling like their kids (or they themselves) are failing. WTM doesn't imply that in any way, it just seemed kind of oblivious to the fact that some (many) people don't learn that way.

[domestic_engineer]

My first revelation on this topic was with my spouse, who is whole to parts. He didn't even realize it himself until we had a discussion after I read Cynthia Uleich Tobias's book The Way They Learn. I honestly just thought that he was a bit sloppy with details, rather than considering it a strength in its own right, complimentary (that definitely at odds some times) with my own perspective.

 

My second revelation was learning that global (whole to parts) and analytic (parts to whole) learning styles are not strictly binary - you don't use one at the exclusion of the other. I am predominantly analytic, but I switch perspectives often. I think encouraging both ways of seeing the world is healthy, for understanding other people, and a strength in your own work/learning.

 

My third revelation about these learning styles was that they were only one way of looking at learning style - one dimension in a multifaceted complex of what we call individual learning style. Knowing and understanding other learning style dimensions and to an extent personality traits gives you a better picture of who your child is, how they learn, what they need, and how to facilitate their education.

 

Figuring out your child's learning style is like putting together a puzzle - it happens in degrees and there's no right or wrong order (or time frame) for doing it. Also, sometimes developmental stages make a certain aspect of learning style appear dominant, but because it is related with universal development and not individual learning style it will change. That wasn't worded clearly, but it's late and I'm not thinking fluidity.

 

I think the whole-to-parts (global) vs parts-to-whole (analytic) point comes up frequently on WTM boards is that WTM, its products, and many other classical curricula are heavily analytic, leaving parents of global a feeling like their kids (or they themselves) are failing. WTM doesn't imply that in any way, it just seemed kind of oblivious to the fact that some (many) people don't learn that way.

Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  

 

Yes! that it's not an either/or scenario.  And both perspectives need to be taught.

 

Yes!  that it's a process ... perhaps a slow process of figuring out the child's learning style.  I am slowly coming to the same conclusions as you, and I feel "behind the curve."  So I appreciate that you shared that it was process for you.  

 

And yes! about developmental stages clouding the waters.  This contemplation is ocurring as we transition from lower to upper grammar, and I am thinking that the lower grammar stage is heavily parts-to-whole.  This combined with your comment about WTM being heavily tilted toward parts to whole curriculum leaves me feeling a bit lost when thinking about whole to parts curriculum and learning styles.

 

 

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and experiences!  

[OneStepAtATime]

Most people do a bit of both.  Some have a stronger leaning towards one than the other, though.

 

DD needs reading/spelling/math broken down into tiny pieces for her to be able to learn it, but she has to have the big picture first or she has nothing to anchor those pieces to.  In school, frequently the teachers would give them pieces without giving them the big picture first.  She had nothing to anchor the knowledge to.  Then they rushed through the pieces and moved onto the next thing.  What she needed was the big picture briefly introduced, then everything broken down into tiny pieces, then a revisiting of the big picture in more detail, then review of those tiny pieces.

 

For other things less academic in nature she needed me to just give her the big picture and move out of her way.  For instance, when the bottom half of the really nice blinds in our kitchen got chewed up by our panic stricken dog, I told DD we were going to have to take them down and toss them.  DD disagreed.  She took the blinds leftover from another part of the house that were longer and meticulously measured and cut them to the correct size for the kitchen windows, restrung the strings, added the newly cut blinds onto the existing blinds and repaired the mechanism.  We couldn't raise them anymore but we could still open and close them and they looked brand new.  She had never repaired blinds, she had never watched a program on repairing blinds, but she was able to take the big picture issue and break it all down in her head on her own.  If I had told her she had to do step one and step two and step three, etc.  she would have hated every minute of it and would probably not have understood what I was trying to tell her and the blinds would never have been repaired, they would have gone in the trash.

[Bluegoat]

I realized with my older daughter when she was, I think, about 8.  It was closely related to trying to teach her math facts.  A big part of it though is I am pretty strongly a whole to parts learner myself, probably more so than most I think.  So I recognized the way she was approaching things.

 

My other daughter is 8 now, and she does not think the same way, but I am not sure if she is a parts to whole, or just different than dd11 and I.  She seems to think more like her father, who I think is a little more linear in some ways, or maybe just more concrete.  Concrete  vs abstract thinking also seems to be a factor with this - I am much better at mentally manipulating abstractions than I am concrete things, even in a whole to parts setting. 

[domestic_engineer]

I realized with my older daughter when she was, I think, about 8.  It was closely related to trying to teach her math facts.  A big part of it though is I am pretty strongly a whole to parts learner myself, probably more so than most I think.  So I recognized the way she was approaching things.

 

Could you elaborate on this, please?

[forty-two]

With my girls, teaching reading gave me a big clue.  They both have phonemic processing weaknesses, and learning to apply phonics knowledge to reading has been a long, hard slog for them both, so I had lots of opportunities to observe their learning, and how *different* it was.  Dd9 united a whole-to-parts (and visual) approach with a phonemic processing weakness (which made learning to read by putting sounds together to form words - the usual phonetic approach - very difficult), and the two interacted to make her *extremely* whole-to-parts in how she learned to read.  I didn't realize just how much until I started teaching dd7 to read, who united a parts-to-whole approach with the same phonemic processing weakness that makes learning to read in a phonetic parts-to-whole way so difficult.  Dd9 used her strengths to *get around* her weakness, while dd7 used her strengths to *overcome* her weakness. 

 

Dd9 didn't have the necessary skills to be able to read phonetically (although I didn't know that until later), and though I taught her completely phonetically, she did her very best to subvert the process ;) (it was hitting a double weakness).  Dd9 is my whole language poster child - she naturally incorporated picture clues and grammar clues into her decoding efforts from the get-go (even though I taught her strictly phonetically).  She read for meaning from the very beginning, and strongly preferred sentences and stories to isolated words.  She also memorized whole words effortlessly from the environment, and from the time she was four baffled us with whether she could read or not (she couldn't connect /c/ /a/ /t/ to /cat/, but she could figure things out that required her to be able to make sense of print).  Learning to read phonetically (or learning to read visually through phonetic teaching) was very much working through her weak area (and I felt *so* conflicted about persisting with phonics when it was so hard for her, knowing all the while that she'd fly if I switched to whole language) - and she in fact learned to read largely visually from strictly phonetic instruction.  At the time I thought something had clicked and she'd overcome her phonemic processing weakness, but I learned later that whatever had clicked allowed her to learn *in spite* of her phonemic processing weakness. 

 

I didn't realize how much of that was her trying to avoid her phonemic processing weakness and how much was whole-to-parts learning until I started teaching dd7.  She had the very same phonemic processing weakness as dd9, but instead of trying to constantly jump ahead or around the difficulty, trying to read *without* having to put the pieces together (like dd9), dd7 kept working on the pieces, not wanting to add on another piece until she'd mastered the pieces she had.  She prefers to read individual words rather than sentences, because there's more parts to put together (whereas dd9 preferred sentences to individual words because she used the context to aid her decoding).  Neither of them had the skills to learn to read phonetically, but where dd9 pulled enough information from elsewhere to read in spite of it (which has made trying to remediate it a trick and a half), dd7 both needed to - and was generally willing to - persist in building up those lacking skills piece by piece.

[Bluegoat]

Could you elaborate on this, please?

 

I've always had an especially hard time memorizing anything that seems like an unrelated list.  I require some kind of narrative or structure or way to hold the group of facts together.  Knowing how multiplication, or addition, worked, wasn't enough - I needed to be able to envision that particular fact within the structure and process.

 

I didn't realize this about myself until I was an adult, in the army.  The classes were taught in a very much parts to whole kind of way.  I could never manage to reliably memorize things like fifle drills until I understood how the rifle worked and could picture the parts moving while I did the drill.  Eventually of course it becomes a matter of muscle memory, and math facts are just "known", but until that point I really needed a structure.

[OneStepAtATime]

I've always had an especially hard time memorizing anything that seems like an unrelated list.  I require some kind of narrative or structure or way to hold the group of facts together.  Knowing how multiplication, or addition, worked, wasn't enough - I needed to be able to envision that particular fact within the structure and process.

 

I didn't realize this about myself until I was an adult, in the army.  The classes were taught in a very much parts to whole kind of way.  I could never manage to reliably memorize things like fifle drills until I understood how the rifle worked and could picture the parts moving while I did the drill.  Eventually of course it becomes a matter of muscle memory, and math facts are just "known", but until that point I really needed a structure.

Yes!  

[Carol in Cal.]

People change, too.

 

I think that in classical education the grammar stage is more or less parts to whole, and at the logic stage you kind of switch toward whole to parts, and at the rhetoric stage you switch all the way to whole to parts.

 

One of the reasons the classical method resonated with me so much is that I so vividly remember switching from being able to memorize things fairly easily to needing to fit them into a logical pattern, around 5th grade.  I don't think I really approached the rhetoric stage until after college.  

 

One of the reasons that we have such trouble with STEM in this country is that we teach the grammar stages of it so late, IMO.  Because that is so, people whose brains have already shifted kind of resent and definitely resist having to go back to the memorization that they are no longer good at, at the college level.

[Bluegoat]

People change, too.

 

I think that in classical education the grammar stage is more or less parts to whole, and at the logic stage you kind of switch toward whole to parts, and at the rhetoric stage you switch all the way to whole to parts.

 

One of the reasons the classical method resonated with me so much is that I so vividly remember switching from being able to memorize things fairly easily to needing to fit them into a logical pattern, around 5th grade.  I don't think I really approached the rhetoric stage until after college.  

 

One of the reasons that we have such trouble with STEM in this country is that we teach the grammar stages of it so late, IMO.  Because that is so, people whose brains have already shifted kind of resent and definitely resist having to go back to the memorization that they are no longer good at, at the college level.

 

I think this is true to some extent.  But even as a child, I could not remember lists of facts.  I could remember copious facts if they were part of, say, a story.  Or a poem, which is a structure in itself. But not the kind of lists that one sees sometimes in certain classical approaches.

 

I do think that children practicing memorization, even if it doesn't come naturally, can improve their capacity, proably more than if they practice when older.

[ScoutTN]

I've always had an especially hard time memorizing anything that seems like an unrelated list.  I require some kind of narrative or structure or way to hold the group of facts together.  Knowing how multiplication, or addition, worked, wasn't enough - I needed to be able to envision that particular fact within the structure and process.

 

I didn't realize this about myself until I was an adult, in the army.  The classes were taught in a very much parts to whole kind of way.  I could never manage to reliably memorize things like fifle drills until I understood how the rifle worked and could picture the parts moving while I did the drill.  Eventually of course it becomes a matter of muscle memory, and math facts are just "known", but until that point I really needed a structure.

 

 

Yes! I remember helping a classmate with a history course in grad school and when I showed him how to make a grid/timeline to connect all the people, books, wars, art, etc., I could see the light bulb come on. He had to see connections before he could remember the pieces. 

[domestic_engineer]

I think this is true to some extent.  But even as a child, I could not remember lists of facts.  I could remember copious facts if they were part of, say, a story.  Or a poem, which is a structure in itself. But not the kind of lists that one sees sometimes in certain classical approaches.

 

DH is a whole to part kinda guy, and this is his experience as well.  

That is the opposite of me, who could do rote memory with ease (childbirth seems to have changed this drastically, ha!) and without complaint.

 

So I have no idea where our kids will "fall"....   :D

[Momto4inSoCal]

I've always had an especially hard time memorizing anything that seems like an unrelated list. I require some kind of narrative or structure or way to hold the group of facts together. Knowing how multiplication, or addition, worked, wasn't enough - I needed to be able to envision that particular fact within the structure and process.

 

I didn't realize this about myself until I was an adult, in the army. The classes were taught in a very much parts to whole kind of way. I could never manage to reliably memorize things like fifle drills until I understood how the rifle worked and could picture the parts moving while I did the drill. Eventually of course it becomes a matter of muscle memory, and math facts are just "known", but until that point I really needed a structure.

This is how I am. I can learn the pieces but it takes a lot of work and I feel very confused during the process. Once I have the whole picture it all become clear and "clicks". If I have an outline before I begin to learn and I understand what the process is leading too then I don't feel so confussed since I understand where the piece of information fits into the entire process.

 

Eta: As an adult understanding this about myself has been very helpful. If I don't understand something or feel confussed about it I will study it from all points or create an outline for myself in order to better understand it.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Momto4inSoCal

[domestic_engineer]

So if many of the curricula popular on these boards are parts-to-whole, what are good ways/curricula for Whole to Parts learners?

[Farrar]

So if many of the curricula popular on these boards are parts-to-whole, what are good ways/curricula for Whole to Parts learners?

 

Brave Writer for writing, the Peggy Kaye books for early grades learning ideas, Miquon for early math, the Arbor School series for middle school math, and Big History for middle school for history are a few that jump to mind offhand. I do see whole to parts leaning things recommended here. I think, as mentioned above, that the WTM method leans toward parts to whole, especially for the early grades, and there are a lot more early grades conversations happening so that's pretty natural.

[Ellie]

Neither of my children (nor I, for that matter) ever fit into the learning styles surveys. Eventually I figured out that we were more visual than auditory or kinesthetic, but that's about it.

[Penelope]

So if many of the curricula popular on these boards are parts-to-whole, what are good ways/curricula for Whole to Parts learners?

MCT for language arts comes to mind.

 

However, I realized a few years ago that it's not the curricula's job to introduce the whole to my kids. It's mine.

 

I think p to w vs. w to p can mean different things. I think most older children, some younger, and pretty much all adults are going to do better in studying many things if they have an idea of the big picture first. Sometimes people mean that by whole to parts, but sometimes I think they mean something else, like immersion learning of a language vs. grammar-translation method.

Edited April 4, 2016 by Penelope