Learning Styles

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There are some simple approaches that teachers can utilize daily that will benefit all students.

Allow more time.  Many children will do better when tets are untimed. Extended time on assignments can also improve the quality of their work.

Teach to their strengths.  Find out what they're good at and interested in and build on these when developing lessons and assignments

Teach to all the senses. Some students can gain information well through lectures and reading assignments, but many can't.  Offer alternatives such as audio books, videos, online learnong, and hands-on assignments.

Give students alternative ways to demonstrate what they know-by drawing, building, performing, and so forth.

Let students rely on technology in their areas of weakness (i.e., using a keyboard instead of writing by hand).

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 We get knowledge from experiences and the brain is constantly trying to label things.

Piaget said, “All organisms develop by interacting with an environment.”

John Dewey said, “We learn by doing.”

Confucius said, “What I hear I forget, what I see I remember, and what I do I know.”

Einstein said, “All true learning is experience, everything else is just information.”

These quotes indicate that learning has a neurobiology basis and based on interactive experiences with the environment.

If you want to fire more neuro pathways, you have to make learning experimental, it is labor intensive.

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What make people happy?  The 3 Cs.

A sense of control

A sense of personal connection to the learning or to the human experience

A sense of confidence

If you have a sense of control and a personal connection towards something you are doing in your life, you have a sense of confidence in what you are doing

This is called self-efficacy.  Gessner Guyer, 2005

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