Today’s Students: A Kaleidoscope of Learning Preferences
When you look through a kaleidoscope and twist the tube, patterns reflect in a mirror to create beautiful, unique, and colorful images and patterns. You never get the same thing twice.
Students in our classrooms are like the images you see in a kaleidoscope: constantly changing, flowing together, sometimes taking different and unexpected shapes, and sometimes presenting a complex pattern.
Our diverse students and their unique learning needs can change as quickly as the images in a kaleidoscope. As educators, we must be ready to meet these needs by understanding our students as completely as we can. One way to accomplish this is through accommodating both our own and our students’ preferred learning styles.
“Every one of us has a learning style, thinking style, and working style as unique as our fingerprints.”
—Gordon Dryden The Power of Diversity: New Ways of Learning and Teaching
Read on to learn about a strategy designed to teach all students based on their individual learning preferences.
We are able to learn, retain, and retrieve information most effectively when we can organize and perceive the information through our own natural learning preferences. There are many learning profile inventories on the Internet and most of us have some idea of how we prefer to learn. In fact, most educators will automatically start teaching through their own preferred learning styles until they make it a habit to incorporate other types.
The four main types of learning styles are:
Kinesthetic
- characterized by body movement and physical activity
- preferred by 35 percent of the general population
Tactual
- characterized by more subtle body and fine motor movement
- preferred by 15 to 25 percent of the general population
Auditory
- characterized by speaking and listening
- preferred by 10 to 15 percent of the general population
Visual
- characterized by seeing and watching
- preferred by 35 to 40 percent of the general population
If you think about how you were taught in school—and the quickest way to share information with someone—auditory is the preferred vehicle. It’s quick, it’s free, and we want to think it’s effective since so many of us teach and/or were taught via a teacher talking.
However, learning something auditorily (by hearing it) is the preferred style of only 10 to 15 percent of all people. Of course, you have limited time each day to cover a great deal of material with many students, and lecturing is quick and easy. How can you share what they need to know when there isn’t time to rebuild your lessons to accommodate the four learning preferences listed above all the time?
You can use a strategy called auditory plus one. This strategy requires you to tweak (not retool) your existing lessons to ensure they meet an adequate balance of your students’ learning style preferences.
For instance, say you have a 25 minute lecture on George Washington’s contributions to American and world culture. If you cut the lecture back to 15 minutes then give students 10 minutes to read more in their textbooks, or perhaps watch a short video clip, you have suddenly increased from meeting the preferences of 10 to 15 percent (auditory preference) to meeting an additional 35 to 40 percent (visual preference).
Here are some more examples of plus one strategies. If you are planning to show a video clip about Egyptian gods (which is a visual preference), encourage students to build likenesses of Egyptian gods out of Play-Doh based on what they have learned (a tactual preference)? Or give them the option of acting out a short play where they perform as the gods (kinesthetic, visual, and tactual). Now you are going beyond just plus one and meeting the learning preferences of virtually the entire class.
The learning style types outlined above are a guideline about the general population. It is best if you can discover how you prefer to learn and how your students prefer to learn. Performance Learning Systems® has created its own research-based learning styles inventory called The Kaleidoscope Profile®. This profile is easy to give, fun to take, and quick to score. We encourage you to take the profile—and more importantly—to teach to all learning style preferences as much as possible using the plus one technique.
Understanding and accommodating learning styles allows us to recognize that our students and learning/teaching circumstances are constantly changing—just like the colors and patterns in a kaleidoscope.
Did you know?
By considering students’ learning styles, teachers can help meet individual student needs and nurture diversity and inclusiveness in the classroom (Reed, 2001).
By employing a variety of strategies, the teacher may address the mixed efficiencies of those students, as well as the dominant and secondary preferences of others. Thus, they reinforce strong preferences and strengthen weaker ones (Haggart, 2003; Silver, Strong, & Perini, 2000).
Most people have a preference for learning through their sense of touch and feeling, their sense of hearing, or their sense of sight. Their learning style, or modality, is the channel through which they receive and retain information best (Silverman & Casazza, 2000).
Check out our related graduate courses Teaching Through Learning Channels® and Teaching Through Learning Channels® Online
Promoting Skills for the 21st Century: Partnership for 21st Century Skills
The 21st century learning and innovation skills are emphasized in The Kaleidoscope Profile®. Understanding how we learn best can create successful life and career skills paths.
References
Haggart, W. (2003). Discipline and learning styles: An educator’s guide. Nevada City, CA: Performance Learning Systems.
Reed, S. E. (2001). Learning styles of American Indian students in Northeastern Oklahoma. Tahlequah, OK: Oklahoma Institute for Learning Styles, Northeastern State University.
Silver, H. F., Strong, R. W., & Perini, M. J. (2000). So each may learn: Integrating learning styles and multiple intelligences. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Silverman, S. L., & Casazza, M. E. (2000). Learning and development: Making connections to enhance teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.