The AutSide Podcast

Episode 393: When Proof Meets Pattern: Teaching Maths to Gestalt Processors


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Today’s episode provides excerpts from a Substack essay that focuses on teaching Gestalt Language Processors (GLPs) in a high school mathematics setting, specifically geometry. The author, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, a special education teacher, introduces an instructional framework—Identify, Represent, Compute, Check—as a way to support students whose comprehension is holistic and intuitive but whose articulation is delayed. This framework is presented as a method and an ethical stance that slows the pace of the classroom to honor the non-sequential thinking characteristic of GLPs, such as a student named “Nico.” Dr. Hoerricks argues that many students are misidentified with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) because educational systems prioritise analytic, sequential thinking and fail to accommodate the gestalt cognitive architecture that sees the whole before the parts. Ultimately, she grounds the proposed framework in established educational research on problem-solving heuristics and cognitive load theory, connecting it to the Natural Language Acquisition (NLA) stages to advocate for a more resonant and equitable approach to teaching.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/when-proof-meets-pattern-teaching

Let me know what you think.

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The AutSide PodcastBy Jaime Hoerricks, PhD