Earlier I wrote about the importance of supporting the development of mathematical communication in a child. I thought break my thoughts up into chunks. Today, I'd like to talk about listening to understand a visual thinker.
One of the difficulties in communicating with a visual-spatial person, especially a child, about how a solution is reached is that they often understand things in pictures. For one thing, there isn't really a sequence of steps they took to arrive at "an answer." Rather, everything is there all at once in the picture. For another, since we converse using language, ask children to explain themselves using language, and often model using language to explain, children expect to explain themselves using language. As children get on in Math, this might evolve into a habit of trying to explain steps in a process using numbers or equations. We need to break out of these two boxes.
