Incorporating Learning Styles into Your Teaching Strategy
“We who teach adults must respond to their needs,” states Dr. Ellen Fiedler. Fiedler, an educator at Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, teaches graduate students pursuing M.A. degrees in education for gifted students. She believes educators need to provide alternative teaching strategies for adult learners and alternative methods for students to document their learning. The alternative teaching strategies and alternative methods for learning documentation are based on students’ learning styles.
Greater knowledge of students’ learning styles has developed over the last several years, giving both educators and students a step up from the old lecture-only methods primarily used in higher education. Today the classroom is alive with the excitement of bodily/kinesthetic learning alongside the more traditional logical/mathematical learning. Below are descriptions of the different learning styles and how educators can incorporate the different styles into their instructional strategies.
Verbal/Linguistic Learners
Verbal/linguistic learners relate to words and language, both written and spoken. These learners learn by saying, hearing, and seeing words. They can easily memorize names, dates, places, and trivia. To help verbal/linguistic learners, use descriptive language. Give these learners assignments involving reading, writing, telling stories, playing word games, and working with jokes and riddles. You’ll find that verbal/linguistic learners are good at creating imaginary worlds.
Logical/Mathematical Learners
Logical/mathematical learners are adept at categorizing, classifying, and working with abstract patterns and relationships. They work well with inductive and deductive thinking and reasoning, numbers, abstractions, logic, problem solving, and moving from the concrete to the abstract. Give these learners experiments to perform, puzzles to solve, numbers to work with, or situations in which they explore patterns and relationships.
Visual/Spatial Learners
Visual/spatial learners rely on their sense of sight and ability to visualize an object. They create mental images and learn by drawing, building, and designing. Give these learners assignments that allow them to create in visual images and use three-dimensional space. Encourage use of color in their work.
Musical/Rhythmic Learners
Musical/rhythmic learners recognize tonal patterns. For optimal learning, suggest they hum or sing information they want to grasp, or have them move their bodies while they study.
Bodily/Kinesthetic Learners
The brain’s motor cortex, which controls bodily motion, is the key to the intelligence of bodily/kinesthetic learners. Provide these learners with hands-on activities, such as sports, dancing, acting, and crafts. These learners need to touch, move, interact with space, and process knowledge through bodily sensations.
Interpersonal Learners
Person-to-person relationships and communication are a must for interpersonal learners. Often class leaders, these learners thrive on group activities. Provide interpersonal learners with assignments that require them to interview and cooperate with others. Give them opportunities to mediate conflicts.
Intrapersonal Learners
Almost the exact opposite of interpersonal learners, intrapersonal learners thrive by working alone. Self-paced instruction and individualized projects work best with these students. Suggest that intrapersonal learners keep a daily journal, as their thoughts are directed inward. They have a great degree of self-understanding and they rely deeply on their instincts.
Naturalist Learners
Naturalist learners observe and understand the organized patterns in the natural environment. Provide them with visualization activities and hands-on activities that are based on nature. Bring the outdoors into the classroom, or assign projects that require spending time in nature. Assign activities that call on the naturalist learner's abilities to measure, map, and chart observations of plants and animals.
Personality Types
In her classroom, Dr. Fiedler summarizes the eight learning styles explained above into four personality types: order seekers, debaters, groupies, and loners. A less clinical approach to personalities than Myers-Briggs or the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, Fiedler’s categories are based on years of observation in the classroom.
“Order seekers,” Fiedler says, “like lectures and linear, sequential thinking. They need a syllabus, and they need to know the goals and objectives for the course.” Like the logical/mathematical learner, these students “need to have knowledge dispersed to them.”
The debaters may be more like verbal/linguistic learners. “I’m just playing devil’s advocate,” is often heard from a debater, Fiedler explains. “You feel they are heckling, but that’s how they learn. The best arguments contain thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The debater is comfortable with abstract/random thinking,” she says. Bodily/kinesthetic learners and musical/rhythmic learners may also be debaters.
"Groupies want to get constructively involved with hands-on experiential learning. They want to make meaning out of things, create things together, and work with other people,” Fiedler states. Like interpersonal learners, groupies need to work in cooperative learning groups.
Fiedler’s final category is the loner. “They don’t want to listen to lectures or debates, not even group discussion. They don’t particularly want to be in the room,” Fiedler says. “They are independent, self-directed learners. They want to go to the library or work on a computer. They are not involved. It’s not that they don’t want to learn; they want to make meaning of the work independently.” These intrapersonal learners will engage in self-paced learning with minimal guidelines. Provide individual guidance, assessment, and checkpoints along the way for them, and let them learn in their own way.
Catering to different learning styles may seem like creating a program of individualized learning for each student. In a way it is, yet it is simpler than it initially sounds. By stepping away from the lecture podium and providing all students with a variety of different teaching strategies and assessment methods, educators are able to reach students within their own comfort level of learning. While one student may be more comfortable with group discussions, another will learn more readily and deeply by working alone, while still another student needs bodily movement activities, and yet another needs visual stimulation.
By providing a variety of teaching strategies in the curriculum, educators are reaching a greater number of learners. By reaching out and providing students with activities that reach them in the ways they best learn, educators are able to give students more information in a shorter time. After all, this is what education is all about—helping students learn.
See this week’s Teaching Tips, and look in the Download Depot for an assessment of students’ learning styles.
Sources:
Dr. Ellen Fiedler: E-Fiedler@neiu.edu
Web Sites:
http://www.Nlu.nl.edu/ace/Resources/Documents/AdultLearning.html
http://www.cyg.net/~jblackmo/diglib/styl.html
http://www.namss.org.uk/lstyles.htm
http://bsd-server.nc.edu/virtcol/sslearn.html
http://kids.lth2.k12.il.us/Kids/News/TrainingSites.htm
