If you think about a time when you have been really engaged in learning a new topic, subject or skill, it is likely that you have interacted with other people in that process. Maybe you remember a project you worked on with a team in school or at work, or a fascinating discussion you had with a friend, or a time when you read an interesting news article and told a family member about it? As we each experience life and its multiple facets, we as humans naturally want to share what we learn with others. That is the idea behind socio-cognitive learning, a key component of the work we do at INSL LLC. When working with our learners one-on-one, we are constantly giving feedback and helping our students revise their thinking about ideas. When they draw after reading a text and make their own mental picture, we ask them questions to add more context to their drawings. We help them learn new vocabulary by discussing words, looking up definitions, drawing out multiple ways to think about the idea of words- and ultimately asking the student to draw their own picture so that new words make sense to them. This is a social process, which taps into the highest level of learning, according to Dr. Ellyn Arwood’s Language theory. Language names our thinking, as Dr. Arwood discovered in her decades of work with neurodiverse learners, and when we share our language with others, we can build capacity and even stronger neural networks in our brains.

-Erin Porter, INSL LLC neuroeducator