4MAT Pure and Simple:

Learning About Learning

Bernice McCarthy
About Learning, Inc.
For information:

About Learning Inc.

441 West Bonner Street
Wauconda, IL 60084
(847) 487-1800

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCarthy, Bernice
4MAT Pure and Simple: Learning about Learning
ISBN

4MAT overview, Model Base, Purpose of 4MAT Process, 4MAT

Eight Assumptions, Teaching for Competence Examples, Right-
and Left-Mode functions in 4MAT, the Complete Cycle.

Copyright © 2014 by About Learning, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher.

4MAT® is a registered trademark of About Learning Inc., Wauconda, IL

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L E A R N I N G A B O U T L E A R N I N G

4MAT Pure and Simple:

Learning About Learning

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of

complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the
other side of complexity.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

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4MAT Pure and Simple

T
his book describes the 4MAT Learning Cycle, a
useful and elegant common sense template for
teaching and learning that matches the design
of how the brain works.

It is written in simple language and contains a brief

synopsis of the 4MAT Model along with an overview of
how the model works. The vital assumptions that form
the heart of the model are also described.

Anyone working to improve education: teacher, tutor,

counselor, parent, corporate or government trainer, will
profit from an adaptive use of this learning design.

We invite the reader to examine the 4MAT pedagogy

and consider its possibilities as a framework for
teaching and learning in all settings. The 4MAT
framework is the perfect fit to the Common Core and
its focus on student performance is a boon to the
emerging needs of 21st Century learners.

The 4MAT Learning Cycle begins as all learning does

by connecting to experience. It then focuses on learner
competence and transfer, the ultimate learning result.
This process provides a structure for evaluating the
complete learning act.

This little book can be read in about an hour. It affords 5

a bracing overview of how learning happens.
4 M A T P U R E A N D S I M P L E

The Base of the 4MAT Model

M
y deepest convictions about learning stem
from the belief that humans emerge and evolve.
They emerge from within and evolve through
thought and action. This idea is epitomized in the work
of Robert Kegan.

This is a perfectly sensible belief. As people live, they

emerge from their present selves, and they evolve,
become more alive, engage in more meaning. As people
learn they value, understand, use and adapt to new
information and experience. 4MAT incorporates
these four necessary learning processes— valuing,
understanding, using and adapting. It is a natural way of
learning and being.

Yet designing instruction to support this human

development model remains discomforting and elusive
to many teachers. If learners are called to emerge from
their life experiences into new understandings that
connect and have meaning for them, do teachers need
to create the experiential activities that will enable this
to happen?

The answer is yes. Teachers must make it possible for

students to make meaning, to become more present to
themselves, to others and to the content knowledge

6 and skills they are called to master.

 
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Teaching seldom begins with meaningful experiential

connections. Instruction often begins with lists of what
must be learned—couched in measurable objectives
concerning materials that are frequently outside learner
experience and interest. Recent research from the
Gates Foundation finds that less than 3% of teachers
demonstrate regard for student perspectives. And so
teachers hear the incessant, ubiquitous “Why do I need
to know this?” question.

Some claim this is the way it must be. Students need

patience. There are many things to learn. It takes
too much time to explore the underlying meanings, to
excite students about what must be learned. That’s
just the way it is. They are expected to ignore the need
for meaningful experiences (in school at least) and
just learn the material. They are told the reasons will
become clear later.

Consider how Kegan describes the learning process.

“When humans emerge from meaningful experiences
and reflect on them, they are able to examine them
by separating from themselves, moving from their
subjectivity to a more discriminating objectivity. They
can “have them rather than be had by them.” They can
understand by applying experiences from their own
lives to new learning, creating new curiosities about the
lives of others and the knowledge they offer. 7
4 M A T P U R E A N D S I M P L E

Something important happens when you begin with

an experiential connection. The learner is caught
up in it. There’s a level of emotion, an impact and a
newness often accompanied by an ineffable sense of
recognition. The learner reflects and ponders. seeks
out more knowledge, has the need to talk it through, to
separate from it to understand it more deeply.
 
Teachers must begin by enabling learners to confront
new learning from the vantage of their own experiences.
Engaging in this process means coming to balance with
the otherness of the learning. It’s about the learner
and the learning. It’s about being and knowing. This
process is at the heart of 4MAT pedagogy and is the
key to all successful teaching.
 

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The Purpose and Simplicity of the 4MAT Process

The Key Goals of This Process:

T
he 4MAT Model is a process for moving people
through a dynamic learning cycle: to connect
learners to significant concepts through the
lens of their own experience, to bring them together to
share their perceptions, to introduce them to excellent
knowledge and ideas,to teach them to critique and
examine, by creating multiple practice activities that
enable all learners to achieve mastery, to coach and
support the evolving expertise levels, to encourage
creativity, by moving them beyond content for its own
sake to usefulness in their own lives.

It’s as simple as that— straightforward teaching:

balancing and rebalancing experiences and wonderings
by exploring the work of experts, developing expertise
and integrating learning. All teaching must start with
the Self and lead back to the Self.

Kegan puts it this way,

…this is the tension between assimilating new
experiences to the old grammar and accommodating
the old to the new.
…An eternal conversation central to the nature of all
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living things.”
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IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE

For those new to 4MAT, this book is a good place to
begin. Those familiar with the 4MAT Learning Cycle will
find important new connections here: the match to the
Common Core competence focus, the enhancement of
student diversity with neuroscience findings, the use of
4MAT as an effective tool for teacher evaluation and
new definitions of the instructional integration of the
major dual brain functions.

4MAT is a match to the primary goal of the Common

Core, to teach for competence. The 4MAT Cycle
moves learners from concept to competence.

In 4MAT, content now serves competence, rather than

the other way around. This is a subtle turn-around
where usefulness becomes primary.

Second, 4MAT strategies and techniques are tools

for evaluating teachers in reference to how they bring
their students (1) to value the learning, (2) examine and
critique the knowledge, (3) master the required skills,
and (4) transfer the learning into their lives.

Third, design steps of 4MAT require the dual use of

synthesizing and analyzing skills to attain the clarity of
brain function balance.
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4MAT: A Prescriptive One-Size-Fits-All

Way to Teach or an Open Ended Instructional
Design?
All successful teaching is art and wisdom. Does the
4MAT design enable artistry without stifling it?

The answer is yes. The design is an invitation to

understand the complete learning cycle. The
application depends on the teacher’s content
perspective and the students’ levels and needs.

4MAT requires teachers to convince learners of the

value of the learning by drawing it forth from their own
experiences, then leading them through the work of the
experts to their own work, their own use of it. It is as
open-ended as the very student diversity it serves.

In addition, teachers must answer the same questions

4MAT requires they ask of their students:
what values, understandings, and skills can I build
into this unit, or this lesson? Willl it help my students
become more than they are now?
Each teaching experience has a life of its own.
12 Effective teachers relentlessy customize, monitor and
adjust to meet the needs of their particular learners
in their particular lives. Successful teaching requires
experiences and discoveries.
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With 4MAT mastery, teachers can shape and modify

each teaching task depending on the learner, the
content and the end result. The design clarifies
the complexity of teaching and provides a deeper
understanding of how learning happens and yet is open
to idiosyncratic adaptation and refinement, the ultimate
measure of its success.

4MAT is an elegant tool in a teacher’s hand.

Because effective teachers and learners intuitively

travel the Learning Cycle, it is useful for people to
compare their current teaching and learning strategies
to the 4MAT learning framework. 13
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Honoring

Wholeness

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Why 4MAT: the Assumptions

Learning is the making of meaning.

Meaning is always highly personal.

Different students master ideas and skills

differently.

People learn best when they connect past

experiences to new learning.

Knowledge is in service to competence.

Knowledge must be presented and

understood conceptually.

The only learning worth measuring is

learning transfer.

Innovative adaptations are the ultimate

result of learning.

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What is 4MAT?
4MAT is a Design for Teaching

I
t is based on four major theories: (1) Kurt Lewin’s
Experimental Learning Model where experience
is connected to new learning to validate and test
abstract concepts; (2) David Kolb’s experiential
learning and his styles research; (3) John Dewey’s
emphasis on learner experience and concept
integration through action, and (4) Robert Kegan’s
(after Jean Piaget) movement from subject to object,
from connecting experience to analyzing experience, as
the key to cognitive growth.

All these models are founded on the premise that

learning is a continuous process of growth and change
that is grounded in experience.

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Lewin’s Cycle

T
his Cycle is a combination of Perceiving, and
Processing. We perceive by being in experiences
moment by moment.

We process by reflecting on those experiences,

(and depending on what we think about them),
acting on what we learn from them.

The overlay of these two dimensions is the foundation

of the 4MAT learning cycle.

Humans learn by moving from feeling to reflecting, to

thinking, to acting. These four cycle points comprise
the design.

To teach this way, just follow the four:

1. Engage student connections to their past, for

emotion, curiosity, eagerness to learn more.
2. Encourage reflections and dialogue that will lead
to deepen expert knowledge,
3. Differentiate strategies so all students move
from practice to expertise,
4. Coach and mentor students to adapt and 17
transfer learning into their lives.  
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Example from 4MAT High School Biology

Julia Koble and Joan Baltzore
Minot High School, North Dakota

Concept is Interdependence, Content is Ecosystem

Essential Question: How do human actions affect the
“circle of life” and what can we do to reduce its impact?

Engage student connections to their past, for

emotion, curiosity, eagerness to learn more.
Teacher sets up an experience where students are
involved with partners requiring interdependence as
the only way to accomplish a task. K’NEX activity
where partner “B” is blindfolded so “A” can only
communicate verbally as “B” attempts to duplicate
the creation made by “A”.

Encourage reflections and dialogue that will lead to

deepen the expert knowledge.
Discussion of interactions ensures regarding
success or lack of it. This is followed by a Circle of
Life metaphor with music (Lion King) and creative
drawings.

Differentiate strategies so all students move from

practice to expertise.
18 Information given on photosynthesis and respiration
interactions and cycling. Then a lab where students
observe interdependence in plants and animals.
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Plants are elodea and animals are aquatic snails.

They are given five hypotheses to examine. What do
these living things take in and what do they give out.
Students choose one hypothesis and observe with
scientific inquiry strategies.
 
Coach and mentor students to adapt and transfer
learning into their lives.

Students go to a Climate Change Blog to answer

three questions posted there. They must choose
one and answer it with their opinions supported by
cited evidence.

Students refine and critique each other’s work and

vote on the most thought provoking perspectives.
These research documents are emailed to elected
officials.

The Cycle works for any student at any age or level, in

any content, to enhance learning. The knowledge of
this Cycle, whether with the 4MAT perspective or not,

3
is crucial for teacher in-service.

1 4
2 19
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Does the Natural Learning Cycle Work

Differently for People?
Yes.
We all travel the complete cycle, we feel, we reflect, we
think, we act. But we have comfort spots, places where
we feel more at home.

People who favor feeling and reflecting are

Type One Learners, who favor discussion and
sharing.
People who favor thinking and reflecting are
Type Two Learners, who favor information and
analysis.
People who favor thinking and acting are
Type Three Learners, who favor problems and
experimentation.
People who favor acting and feeling are
Type Four Learners, who favor innovation and
adaptations.

The research is clear. Most of us favor one place on the

cycle more than the other three.
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The good news is that all four styles are equally first-
rate. The bad news is that many teachers don’t know
that.
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FEELING, EXPERIENCING
Type Four Learners Type One Learners

Favor Experiencing and Favor Experiencing and

Acting Reflecting

Very outging, concerns Highly social, concerns

for innovation and for inclusion and caring
moving forward, for all equally, Empathic
Entrepreneurial, Collaborators
Innovators

ACTING REFLECTING

Type Three Learners Type Two Learners

Favor Thinking and Favor Thinking and

Acting Reflecting

Down-to-Earth, Analytic, concerns for

concerns for clarity and evidence,
workability and Critical Thinkers
Usefulness Pragmatic Planning Strategists
Problem Solvers
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THINKING, CONCEPTUALIZING
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MAT is teaching around the Cycle from
experiencing to reflecting to thinking to acting—
accommodating and stretching all four kinds of
learners.

The Cycle is the Learning process itself. All learners

need to travel the cycle; the Cycle is the way everyone
learns everything.

Teachers must get learners to go beyond their favorite

ways and instill a vision of what they might become.

22 “All movement is thirst.” Hafiz

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How to Orchestrate the Movement Around the

Cycle
Create experiences that connect students to learning.

Structure discussions for sharing of student

perceptions.

Have students bring awareness of their own

perceptions to their examination of expert knowledge.

Create practice that leads to competence and that

is skillful enough to enable the learner to adapt the
learning for her or his personal use.

Support students in creating clearings for unique

adaptations and transfers into their lives.

That’s how learning happens. Transfer is everything..

Transfer is “the holy grail of teaching.” (Pelligrino)

I would love to live Like a River flows,

Carried by the surprises of its own unfolding.
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—John O’Donohue
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Assumption Number 1
Learning is the Making of Meaning

B
eing alive is making meaning. In a classroom where
this is going on you see curiosity, engagement;
students wondering, eager to go deeper.

Building student motivation and engagement is an act of

caring. It always goes deeper than you think. To prepare
to teach with 4MAT, you sit and noodle to get to the
material’s conceptual depth, which is crucial to all of this.
You have to touch the heart of the learning to create a
strong connection to students.

So begin with what student’s already know so they can

find their own meanings.

When you go deep, you see an emergence, a coming

together of the material and the experiences and
needs of your particular learners. When you see that
emergence you’re on the right track.

You must know content well to make it relate.

And you must know your students well as well.

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Assumption Number 2
Meaning is Always Personal

P
eople see from behind their own eyes.
Teaching means dealing with multiple pairs of
eyes with diverse experiences and accompanying
feelings. The challenge is to engage these diverse
perceptions, pique multiple curiosities, draw students
to the big ideas, the essence meanings that will connect
to their lives.

This is where expert teaching tells. The master teacher

is a great story teller, a great conceptualizer. The only
way to successfully engage students is to start with
what they know, to conceptualize content, to get at the
essence that will help them merge into the learning.

This means stumbling along at first, deciding not only

which are the most significant ideas, but which will
engross your particular students.

How can teachers create this coming together?

The answer is threefold:

the world decides,
each teacher decides.
the students’ needs decide.
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The world decides because knowing is constantly
emerging, melding today’s knowledge to yesterday’s.
4 M A T P U R E A N D S I M P L E

The teacher decides by mining the material with his or

her perceptions, experiences, current knowledge and
passion.

The students decide because of who they are and what

they need.

Expert teaching means the ability to see learners, to

really see them, not only as they are today but in their
possible tomorrows.

Teaching for meaning is all three:

a teacher’s self-knowledge,
the current concept knowledge now alive in the world,
and who the students are.

This is the heart of the profession.

It’s personal all the way round.

This way of being with another which is termed empathic

means temporarily living in their life,
moving about in it delicately, without making judgments…
a complex, demanding, strong yet subtle and gentle way of
26 being.
—Carl Rogers
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Assumption Number 3
Different Students Learn Differently

P
eople really do have learning styles and most
people prefer one part of the Cycle, a particular
combination of the perceiving and processing
dimensions, more than the other three.

Type One learners prefer Feeling and Reflecting

Type Two learners prefer Thinking and Reflecting
Type Three learners prefer Thinking and Acting
Type Four learners prefer Acting and Feeling

David Kolb examined learning style characteristics in

relation to the Cycle parameters and gave us the initial
style descriptions.

All four cluster in professions that attract some styles

more than others.

Public health nurses have higher percentages in

Quadrant One,
Medical personnel in Quadrant Two,
Engineers, police officers in Quadrant Three,
Sales people, entrepreneurs in Quadrant Four.
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People need to engage in all four kinds of learning

experiences. Success in life is traveling the complete
cycle.

FEELING, EXPERIENCING

Type Four Learners Type One Learners

Favor Experiencing and Favor Experiencing and

Acting Reflecting

Prefer open-ended Prefer discussion in

projects outside the small groups where
classroom - into the perceptions are shared.
community.

ACTING REFLECTING

Type Three Learners Type Two Learners

Favor Thinking and Favor Thinking and

Acting Reflecting

Prefer hands-on learning Prefer lecture and

in laboratory type teacher - directed
28 settings. structures.

THINKING, CONCEPTUALIZING
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Assumption Number 4
Without Learner Connections to Past
Experiences, Learning Suffers.
To create deep learning teachers must be skilled at
relating big ideas to student experiences - big idea
concepts the can connect to, like dreams, choices,
luck and wonder. If their teachers introduce new and
important learning in ways that connect, students will
even tell their own stories about them.

If you’re teaching…
Probability and statistics, you might start with luck.
Scientific Inquiry, start with wonder.
Canterbury Tales, start with context.
American Civil Rights, start with dreams.
Constitutional Law, start with tension.
American Progressivism, start with voice.
Fractions, start with whole to part.
Quadratic Equations, start with relationships.
Short Story, start with nuclear experiences in ordinary
lives.
A Man for All Seasons, start with choice.
Cell structure, start with teamwork.

Master teachers challenge surface observations, and

uncritical thinking by creating concepts that relate the 29
big ideas to students. These concepts are touch points
for spurring student engagement and curiosity.
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Assumption Number 5
Knowledge Serves Competence, Not the other
Way Around.

R
emember the traditional approach to teaching. We
were taught to teach the curriculum with assigned
texts and we were expected to cover it all.

The students were to master it all and to prove it with

tests designed to cover it all. When they couldn’t or
wouldn’t, they were failed—it was assumed they were
just not up it.

If students did well the teachers were praised.

If students did not do well, they were blamed.

The focus was on knowledge, not on what the students

could do with the knowledge.

The Common Core changes that focus. The content

remains rigorous but it is in service to the usefulness and
integration of learning.

This question sums up the focus:

Would you rather be knowledgeable or competent?

30 A facetious question?
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Yes, to the extent that one could ever exist without the
other, but the question is serious regarding the most
important learning results.

21st Century learning means students master the

skills and can adapt and integrate them into their
lives. Involves bringing all students, 100% of them, to
competence, differentiating multiple strategies and
techniques in order to reach them all.

It is also crucial to note that skills and drills, however

creatively differentiated, must stand on a rigorous
knowledge base.

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Examples of The Competence Focus

Fifth Grade English Language Arts Reading Standards
Key Ideas and Details

Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the

text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the
text.

5th graders when reading a science essay on bird

migration must not only relate its content accurately,
but describe which parts are facts and which are author
opinions. They must give their own reasons and support
their reasons.

Primary Students Math Task

Students create a garden outside their classroom. They

need to figure out what they need to build it with given
specifications.

Students have to: Calculate the perimeter, surface and

volume of each garden section, make sketches, decide
how much soil, what to spend on plants, what chosen
plants need in space and care, and stay within a $250
budget.
32 Note that competence grows significantly by involving
people in doing meaningful work. Teachers must reteach
L E A R N I N G A B O U T L E A R N I N G

necessary knowledge and skills with one-on-one

help, peer partnering and/or group tutoring when
necessary.

High School Modeling with Geometry

Apply geometric concepts in modeling situations

1. Use geometric shapes, their measures and their
properties to describe objects.
3. Apply geometric measures to solve design
problems

10th Graders in geometry have to create a nine- hole

miniature golf course. They work in partners and apply
their knowledge of the geometric formulas to design the
course.

The golf course must include a circle, semicircle,

hexagon, pentagon, and equilateral triangle. Each
hole must use a different polygon or combination of
polygons. These can be hand drawn or computer
generated.

The knowledge and skills for this task include:

geometric formulas, measurement, meters, design,

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an understanding of “polygoness” and collaborative
problem solving. This is a student-centered way of
learning about polygons by applying knowledge to a
performance task.
4 M A T P U R E A N D S I M P L E

10th Grade Range of Reading and Level of Text

Complexity

Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes

or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the
approaches the authors take.

10th grader Task—Read an 1872 speech by Susan B.

Anthony. (Women’s Rights Activist) Then read John
Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690) and
list the common ideas and the support Locke’s writing
gave to Anthony’s views. (Equality of all citizens) Cite
your evidence.

Along the path of learning

playfulness is the thing.
- Unknown

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Assumption Number 6
Knowledge Must be Understood and
Presented Conceptually.

T
his is a major challenge for some teachers. Many
will ask for a list of the important concepts, so
they can focus on them while moving through
the material. The list they hope to find, if prepared by
experts in the discipline, is of course a great help. But
the focus needs to include the context. Who are their
particular students, and in what particular place are
they learning together?

Big-idea choices must be made in the present milieu,

true to the essence of the material and with primary
regard for who the students are. This is the real
conceptualizing task—to choose the most significant
big ideas and connect them experientially to students.

Concepts are generalizable, having universal

application. They cross disciplines and have far wider
meaning that the material itself.

A good concept eases the way for teachers to create

beginning experiences that will have emotional appeal
and arouse the curiosity of students.

The cross-discipline quality of big idea means concepts 35

with common themes unify.
4 M A T P U R E A N D S I M P L E

For example, the idea of “System” could be explored

as “My world,” in primary school, in middle school as
a “Recycling Unit” in high school biology with Body
Systems, an approach of great interest to adolescents.
Concepts cut across disciplines by connecting and
integrating.

Concepts lead to larger purposes than the material

itself. Choosing luck as the major concept to begin a
probability and stats unit leads into a big-idea discovery
involving likelihood, chance, and odds that can then
lead into a how-does-this-happen curiosity for deeper
unknowns, and on to perseverance. Learning is both fun
and hard.

In Harvard Business leadership seminars participants

are asked to “Get on the Balcony” to improve their
awareness of the big picture, using it to encompass and
pattern the myriad details down on the field. Teachers
use the same process when they begin with concepts.
The student encompasses the details with a picture of
the whole. It is much easier to learn that way.

The ability to conceptualize the essence of content

and connect it experientially to learners
36 is the most important key to successful
instructional design.
- Bernice McCarthy
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Assumption Number 7
The Only Learning Worth Measuring is
Learning Transfer.
If students can’t transfer it into their lives, they haven’t
learned it.

“Taking what was learned and transferring it is the

“holy grail of teaching.”
James Pelligrino, University of Chicago

Pelligrino defines experts as people who have a level of

understanding, that enables them to transfer learning
to problem solving.

“The expert can engage in a mathematical argument, a

historical argument, or argue a scientific solution.”*

The 4MAT design takes learners directly into problem

solving through the use of an overarching concept.
And concepts are required for real life problem solving.

Teach students when and how to apply the learning in

their own lives. Quadrants Three and Four of 4MAT
require this of students. In Quadrant Three they
experiment. In Quadrant Four they adapt.
37
Assessment must also be couched in real life issues that
require competent performance.
4 M A T P U R E A N D S I M P L E

If you’re teaching…

Probability and statistics, start with Luck,

Essential Question: In what way does chance show up in
the real world?
Assessment: Research 2 games of chance. Explain how
they are played and the odds of winning. Display these
2 games and your research on poster board for a gallery
walk as a culminating celebration of a unit on probability.

Scientific Inquiry, start with Wonder,

Essential Question: How does wonder lead to questions
and how can we find answers to those questions?
Assessment: Conduct your own inquiry; State why you
chose this particular area to research, the history of the
issues, your final position and your evidence.

Canterbury Tales, start with Context,

Essential Question: Can one person’s story be a story
for all of us, and if that is true, how is that possible?
Assessment: Create a character and that character’s
38 story in the context of the 21st century using Chaucer’s
style.
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The United States Constitution, start with Tension,

Essential Question: How does the tension between
freedom and order play out in our democracy?
Assessment: Choose the persona of one of the
members of the Constitutional Convention. Create
a presentation of the key issue that lawmaker was
arguing for. There will be ten other historical personas
you will be addressing in your presentation.

The Short Story start with Impact,

Essential Question: The short story narrates a
nuclear experience in an ordinary life. What does that
statement mean?
Assessment: Write a short story

Energy from Matter, start with Transformation,

Essential Question: What does the statement, “You are
what you eat” mean?
Assessment: Students have a variety of research
topics to choose from to complete a project of their
own. Presentations shared in teams of 3-4 students
as written or computer produced or in poetry or music
with clarity about the new learning and/or original
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drawings with explanations.
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Assumption Number 8
Innovative Adaptations are the Ultimate Learning
Results.
Successful Social Innovators, Academicians, Engineers
and Entrepreneurs:

Live happily with vague ideas.

Keep returning to an emerging idea.
Are attracted to novelty, to the discrepant event.
See possibilities.
Trust instinct and intuition and follow it.
Begin reshaping learning to its own use.
Have a low fear of failure.
Push to solutions when problems are interesting and
complex, and the more complex the better.
See obstacles as bugs that simply can be fixed.

Teaching success is when the students take center stage.

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Right- and Left-Mode Functions and 4MAT

T
he 4MAT use of Right and Left Mode
processing is like Parker Palmer’s notion of “the
ability to hold tension in life-giving ways. Putting
this notion into the 4MAT vernacular, the ability to hold
two major brain functions in balance in all teaching:
the balance of the Right Mode synthesizing. imaging
and intuiting and with the Left Mode analyzing,
rationalizing and specifying.

Two important recent books give prestigious credence

to the notion of right- and left-mode functioning.
Daniel Kahnmann describes these complementary
functions as “fast and slow thinking”, and Chip
and Dan Heath metaphorize the description as “an
emotional elephant with a deliberate, analytic rider
atop”.

Balance strategies that require students to use both of

their brain functions.

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Overlay of Both Right and Left Functions

T
he 4MAT design alternates the synthesizing right
mode and the analyzing left mode throughtout
the 4MAT Quadrants to assure balance and
interaction.

CONNECT AND ATTEND

The right-mode step of Connecting the concept
experientially and the left-mode step of Attending to
the experience enhances the sharing and analyzing of
perceptions and the Quadrant One focus on meaning.

IMAGE AND INFORM

The right-mode Imaging captures the Quadrant One
big idea experience and the left-mode information steps
enhance the Quadrant Two focus on the concept, the
big idea both in image and symbol (words).

PRACTICE AND EXTEND

The Left Mode step of practice in the way of the
experts combined with the right-mode step of
experimenting by extending the learning to personal
usefulness enhance the Quadrant Three focus on
practice and problem solving.

42 REFINE AND PERFORM

The left-mode step of refining and editing the project
prepares for the integration (performance) of the
personal adaptation and integration function of
Quadrant Four.
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The Complete 4MAT Cycle

creating the connecting experience,
encouraging discussion and sharing of perceptions
requiring an imaging of the concept,
informing with the best and most current knowledge,
structuring the practice with different options,
providing multiple strategies for extending learning into
students’ lives,
monitoring student refinement and editing of their work,
and
evaluating the performance and integration of learning
into the lives of students .

The combination of strategies in the 4MAT learning

design insures the balance of life-giving tensions and
completes the learning act in the flow around the Cycle.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”

- Leonardo

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4MAT Complete

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Sources
Baltezore, Joan and Koble, Julia. 4MAT4Biology Course

Dewey, John. Experience and Education, 1938 and How

We Think, 1910

Heath, Chip and Dan. Switch: How to Change Things

When Change is Hard, 2010

Holmes Sr., Oliver Wendell. The quote is attributed to him.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow, 2011

Kegan, Robert. The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in

Human Developmnt (1982) In Over Our Heads: The Mental
Demands of Modern Life (1994)http://www.goodtherapy.
org/famous-psychologists/robert-kegan.html

Kolb, David A. Experiential Learning: Experience as The

Source of Learning and Development, 1982.

Lewin, Kurt. Field Theory in Social Sciences, 1951

O’Donahue, John. Conamara Blues, “Fluent,” 2000

Pellegrino, James. Knowing What Students Know: The

Science and Design of Educational Assessment, 2001

Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind: Moving from the

Information Age to the Conceptual Age, 2005
45
Rogers, Carl. On Becoming a Person, 1961

Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammed Hafiz-S Sharazi