Transcript PREPARING TO TEACH IN THE LIFELONG LEARNING SECTOR (PTLLS)

PREPARING TO TEACH IN THE LIFELONG
LEARNING SECTOR (PTLLS)
ON-LINE TOPIC
LEARNING STYLES
HOW DO YOU LIKE TO LEARN?
 Spend a few minutes thinking about how you learn best. Do you
like someone to explain everything to you? Do you prefer to be
left alone to read instructions? Do you just like to start and try
things until something works?
 We all prefer to learn in different ways and your learners won’t be
any different.
 We can use the different ways we learn to identify our own
preferred learning style.
 Now go to the College intranet site. In the right hand side under
the heading ‘Students’ you will be able to click on a title ‘Learning
Styles’ . This will take you to an on-line Learning Styles
questionnaire which you should complete and then print off the
results.Your tutor will ask you which style has been identified as
your own preferred learning style.
THE LEARNING STYLES
 Research by Peter Honey & Alan Mumford suggests that there are
four learning styles – pragmatists, activists, theorists & reflectors
– but often this is narrowed down to three major types – visual
learners, auditory learners & kinaesthetic learners.
 http://www.businessballs.com/vaklearningstylestest.htm
- information on learning styles + link to free learning styles test you could use with your learners
 http://www.vark-learn.com/english/index.asp
- a guide to VARK learning styles
 http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd/pgrd/resources/teaching/theo
ries/honey-mumford
- more about Honey & Mumford
VISUAL LEARNERS …
 … are often meticulous & neat in their work
 … can find it difficult to follow verbal only instructions
 … tend to be observers rather than talkers or immediate
participants
 … often find use of colour helpful
 … can learn well from ‘visual’ explanations using
video/DVD.
AUDITORY LEARNERS …
 … enjoy talking & listening to others
 … respond well to verbal instructions
 … may have difficulty following written instructions
 .. often work best if they can hum/sing/talk whilst they are
working, but
 … may be easily distracted by a noisy environment or
background music
KINAESTHETIC LEARNERS …
 … often do not like reading and are poor at spelling
 … may fidget with pens and other items whilst studying
 … like practical, ‘hands-on’ activities
 … often use their hands while they are talking
POINTS TO CONSIDER
 Most learners don’t fall neatly into one style, they are
generally multi-modal.
 Many learners who have had poor prior learning experiences
at school are predominantly kinaesthetic learners who have
not succeeded with a the more auditory methods employed
in the past by schools.
 We should be wary of pigeon-holing our learners into one
style and assuming that they can’t learn by other methods
 To be able to succeed and progress in their learning, we need
to encourage and support our learners to widen their
learning styles so they can take advantage of all teaching.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
 Research has shown that we retain …..
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see & hear
70% of what we say
90% of what we say as we do
(Pike, (1989), quoted in Gravells, A., (2011), Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector, Learning
Matters.)
SUPPORTING OUR LEARNERS
 As we can see from the previous research, for our learners to be
able to retain the maximum amount of information, it is
important that we help then to widen their learning styles.
 Spend a few minutes now considering the following situations &
how you would respond to them:
- It is important that your learners keep notes in class to refer
back to later. How would you support your visual learners to do
this?
-Your auditory learners need to carry out a number of practical
tasks. How would you help them to follow your demonstrations &
retain what they need to do?
- In your subject (& virtually everyone else’s too!) there is a
specialist vocabulary that your learners need to be able to spell.
How would you help your kinaesthetic learners to achieve this?
PRACTICAL STRATEGIES (1)
 To help visual learners with tasks such as note-taking you
need to introduce them to strategies such as highlighting,
bulleting and mind-mapping which will provide them with
visual prompts & help them structure note in a way that is
accessible to them. If you are not familiar with mindmapping the site below will give you instructions & the
YouTube video shows Tony Buzan, the ‘inventor’ of mind
maps talking about how they work
 http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qQ
PRACTICAL STRATEGIES (2)
 To support your auditory learners in following
demonstrations you could provide them with a pro-forma to
write down the instructions during the demonstration.
 To support your kinaesthetic learners to learn specialist
spellings you need to consider a practical activity such as
dividing words into parts on cards & getting them to match
them in the correct order e.g.
thetic
kin
aes
RECENT RESEARCH
 In recent years, Professor Frank Coffield has carried out research
into the field of Learning Styles arguing that it is more important
to support learners to expand the ways in which they learn, than
to label them as having one particular learning style.You can find
more about Professor Coffield’s work at:
 http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2153773
 http://www.ttrb.ac.uk/ViewArticle.aspx?contentId=11465
 And you should also know that some researchers think that learning styles actually don’t
exist although we are a long way in education generally from accepting this.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk