There's a price to pay when we force employees into roles that highlight their weaknesses.

"While we're busy trying to fix ourselves and others, we often minimize or completely overlook our most powerful asset--our strengths."

"Strengths are a person's innate talents, things they do well naturally. Every person has them, and when identified, nurtured and channeled appropriately, they can have a dramatic effect on job satisfaction and bottom-line performance."

"Indeed, research suggests that the most successful people start with a dominant talent and then add skills, knowledge and practice into the mix. In other words, we stand a greater chance of success if we build on our authentic selves--who we already are--beginning with our innate strengths."

"Perhaps even more significantly for employers, a powerful connection exists between employees' levels of engagement and the extent to which they maximize their strengths on the job." 

"But as BBN found out, there's a price to pay for trying to force employees into roles that highlight their weaknesses and don't play to their strengths."*

Yes, the selection above was written about business. But I ask you: doesn't it make sense to follow these same principles in education? If using your strengths translates directly to success in business wouldn't the concept of using our strengths in learning also apply? 

Do you know a visual-spatial learner? (We could also use the terms hands-on-learner, picture-thinker, dyslexic or dyslexic-like learner here as well.) 

Dyslexics have a magical talent, a mysterious power that can be launched at any given moment. But from minute to minute that talent may seem to disappear at will; seemingly vanishing into thin air! Their ability to read from a book that they truly love and are highly interest in can be wonderful, while at the same time they can barely lift the cover of a book they're not interest in. (Forget about asking them to read from the uninteresting book!)

If you've ever tried to teach a child who is a strong picture-thinker how to read you know exactly what I'm talking about! Picture thinkers can tell you word-for-word what they read when it's about their favorite subject. But the same person has no clue about what they read, when expected to read something that's not interesting to them.  

My husband reads any material -fiction or non-fiction- and reads it easily, when it's about something he loves, like computers...stuff I know nothing about. That's about it, though. Outside of that area he is basically a non-reader. 

Couldn't we say that the goal in educating someone is to provide them with an opportunity to be successful in life?  By giving someone the tools they need to continue acquiring necessary information wouldn't we be supporting their quest for self-sufficiency?

The other day I assessed a six year-old. He can write in cursive, mentally compute multiplication facts accurately and build Lego projects designed for children more than twice his age. He's six! Here's what his mother, Michelle, had to say: 

The theory is that the same dis-orientation that allows him to see in 3-D prevents him from reading & writing in 2-D.  The remedy is to re-orient the mind’s eye.  How complexly simple is that! As for my son, he gets to meet with Cathy to talk about his imagination and play with clay.  He thinks it’s kind of cool.

Simple. Yes, let's make it simple for picture-thinkers to learn how to read. 

Going back to the Forbes article, the last statement "...there's a price to pay for trying to force employees into roles that highlight their weaknesses and don't play to their strengths." 

This applies to learning as well.  Michelle nailed it when she said we'd talk about imagination, playing with clay, and that it is pretty cool!

*http://www.forbes.com/2011/04/27/employer-employee-focus-on-strengths-not-weaknesses.html

For more information on OnPoint Learning and the Davis methods go to http://onpointlearning.org/