#teaching styles

I think the sad truth is that Adam is one of those rock star professors who are incredible lecturers but their classes are so big that they don't really get to forge much of a one-on-one relationship with a lot of his students. And like... he's kinda there to teach huge classes and lure people to Sinclair. That is explicitly one of the things that they hired him for. But he teaches 400 people, standing-room-only classes. And often gets pulled away from his teaching work due to major developments in the field/magical emergencies/calls from the president. So let's be real: if you're a student in Adam's classes, your homework's getting graded by an assistant. If you're having trouble with the work, you're talking to one of the six TA's the class has. If you try to go to Adam's office hours, you get crowded out by people in other majors who are dropping by just to ask questions about magic. (Despite the sign telling people not to do this.)

Which is not to say that he isn't a good professor. A few of the best, most thoughtful, most insightful professors I ever had were people who were basically doing the university version of an arena concert, lecturing at a sea of anonymous students, none of whom they ever really got to know. But the lectures were great, the way I think Adam's lectures are great. He just doesn't have the time or the space to develop the kind of one-on-one, tough-love relationship that McCandless had with him.

So in teaching college I learned about learning styles about how important it is to incorporate all types of learning styles in your lesson. Visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc. As a kid either they didn't know about this shit or my teachers never bothered with it. Because for so many classes I was completely disengaged and often wasn't learning except to regurgitate info at test time only to forget it when I didn't need it anymore. Because they only taught with books or lecture.

*However* when i got to college and learned about the different learning styles, I was SHOOK when I realized I was 100% a kinesthetic learner. AKA I learned by doing things hands-on. Someone shows me how to do something in front of me and then they watch me do it and correct me as I'm going if I mess up. If we can do it step by step together it's even better. This is why I was SO successful in art classes, that was their primary mode of teaching. The fact that I didn't realize I wasn't retaining or caring about information was because they weren't teaching it in a way I could grasp blew my mind. And it explained a lot of reasons why learning new tasks at work was difficult for me, because my manager at the time would tell me and give me a job aid—a packet with written instructions. When I realized I was a fully kinesthetic learner I told him that, told him what that meant, and asked if he could modify the way he teaches me things. Because he was baller he DID and just GUESS who became one of his best and most efficient managers within a couple of weeks? Yeah. Rather than constantly asking him to repeat things he's told me a million times all he had to do was give me a quick 10-20 minute hands on situation and I would know it perfectly. Sure it took more time in the moment but it paid off and saved time reteaching in the end.

Another thing is that while I LOVE learning new things, I am horrible at teaching myself new things. Classes—hands on classes—are almost a must. Learning new languages is something I love doing but I cannot teach myself very well. I need to be in a physical space with other learners in order for anything to stick. Same with a lot of other things. I can remember random interesting facts, but I cannot teach myself something completely new without being in a classroom. Idk if it’s because they completely neglected teaching kids how to be independent in learning or if it’s just how my brain is wired, but it is frustrating to say the least.

My main gripe/rant is that I fucking wish they would teach kids learning styles earlier. If I had known I needed to be hands on in everything I did I would have likely actually enjoyed school and obtained way more information. Another reason why I was also good at science because in science you do labs, which is doing stuff with your hands and observing it. If I could have told teachers in classes I struggled in that I cannot learn via lecture and worksheets alone and they actually accommodated for that I think school would have been so different for me. Not to mention how it affected my work life. If people could tell someone “hey, I learn better by doing it as you teach.” Or “I learn if you physically show me and I do it right after as you watch.” It would make a big difference. Instead so many workers just watch training videos or reading job aid packets and are expected to know pretty advanced stuff depending on the job. I feel like life in general would be better if learning styles was acknowledged in every aspect of life and taught to everyone early on, not just teachers in teaching college who learn about it and then never fucking use it in practice because it’s too much work. (Not hating on teachers here, really, it is so much work and teachers are chronically overworked and underpaid. Schools dgaf if students retain information outside of school, they only care about test scores, so teachers “teach to the test” as they call it and pray students know it well enough to score well so they don’t lose their fucking job.) I think if schools weren’t so heavily test-focused, ESPECIALLY standardized testing, things would just be better as a whole.

Learning Styles Inventory #FOANed #nurseeducator #nurse #teachingstyles

Journal Club Article: Collins, J. B., & Pratt, D. D. (2011). The teaching perspectives inventory at 10 years and 100,000 respondents: Reliability and validity of a teacher self-report inventory. Adult Education Quarterly, 61(4), 358-375. Background on Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) “Ten years of accumulated responses for more than 100,000 respondents in more than 100 countries has…

This blog has been sharing an overview of American history to provide a summary account of how the US has become a nation of people disposed to deviant behavior.  Starting with the posting, “Early On,”[1] that account has reviewed those aspects of America’s past that have encouraged too many Americans to deviate from laws or norms.  The focus of this review has been the nation’s culture.

It began by describing how in its origin, the nation struggled through the clash between Calvinism and transcendentalism.  It then described how the individualism of transcendentalism was reinforced by pragmatism as the basic ideas of William James were reviewed.  That posting, “Representations of Reality,”[2] left readers with an indication that the advent of television solidified a self-centered sense of reality among the American people.  Interested readers are encouraged to read those two prior postings if they have not done so.

On the topic of TV, this blog counts on the work of the late Neil Postman.  “I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous and absurdist,”[3] wrote Postman.  Written exposition, which was the major method of communication coming into the mid-twentieth century, demands analysis and inferential thinking skills.  By way of a historical note, Postman claimed that the beginning of the end for exposition began with the invention of the photograph but surely was accomplished with the effects of TV.

By what means?  The image media of television demands passivity as the viewer is presented with a discontinuous, trivial reality.  This is highly congruent with the philosophical disposition left from the nation’s historical development.  America was ready for the worst effects of this newer media.

One can compare that to a previous time when information was expressed through written words; this previous state demands a culture which promotes a reflective and useful presentation of information in its discourse of reality.  Postman related how America was different in the nineteenth century despite its transcendental biases.  In fact, America was a book and pamphlet reading nation.

Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all discourse.  The resonances [defined as the power of influencing thought and action] of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular, of expository prose, could be felt everywhere.[4]

As opposed to that level of reflection, the television culture is bombarded with a constant stream of useless, disconnected information.  This “peek-a-boo” form of messaging or discourse is ubiquitous with “only one pervasive voice – the voice of entertainment.”[5]  It also seems alive and well in the age of the cell phone. While Postman gave in his cited book many examples of the pervasiveness of this entertainment outlook, the example most relevant here is in the chapter entitled, “Teaching as an Amusing Activity.” 

As elsewhere, the character of the media in classrooms determines the character of the activity.  In terms of schooling, that is, the activity is formulating the curriculum.  What is most frightening about Postman’s argument is that the cited dangers seem to be accepted as innovative education.  He argued that educational television follows TV’s commandments:  no prerequisites, no perplexity, and avoidance of exposition. 

More generally, within that media, this approach renders it impossible for any instructional messaging to look at any issue responsibly either within classrooms, or at home.  There are the cable channel news networks, such as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, but their viewership is best measured in the hundreds of thousands of viewers (Fox leads with over 2 million), [6] a fraction of the adult population.

To the argument that TV allows educators the ability to present studied materials dramatically, Postman cited research that questions the notion of that advantage – that is that learning takes place when material is presented in dramatic style.  He summed up the effect of curriculum based on TV as follows:

And, in the end, what will the students have learned?  They will … have learned something about [the subject matter].  Mainly, they will have learned that learning is a form of entertainment or, more precisely, that anything worth learning can take the form of an entertainment, and ought to.[7]

This blogger can only add that during the course of his career (1972-2007), his experience demonstrated an ever-shorter tolerance among students to engage with plain verbal communication.  And in addition, the prevailing disposition that students expressed seemed to be, as they walked into the classroom, “entertain me or what you have to do or say is illegitimate.”

By illegitimate this blogger does not mean only boring, but that the experience is an unjustified waste of their time.  And of course, the relevant standard of entertainment is defined by the prevailing media forms, such as TV, which are multi-million-dollar media productions. 

At best, only a relative handful of individual teachers, in the multitude of classrooms across the nation, can compete with that level of entertainment.  And that is to say nothing about whether those teachers who can are actually teaching anything of worth.  One can suppose the answer is no, given the general estimation as to how effective American schools are – mediocre at best.[8]

But TV is not the only agent legitimizing this dysfunctional cultural bias.  Educators themselves have adopted certain concepts and paradigms that further complicate the situation and compound the prevailing individualism, anti-intellectualism, and temporal view of the American people.  Educators have not been immune from the above-described historical forces.  And to boot, these forces met their “scientific” foundation in perceptual/humanistic psychology, a turn which this blog will next address.

[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Early On,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, February 13, 2024, accessed February 15, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, “Representations of Reality,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics, February 16, 2024, accessed February 17, 2024, URL:  https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.

[3] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York, NY:  Penguin Books, 1985), 27.

[4] Ibid., 41.

[5] Ibid., 80.

[6] “Dominick Mastrangelo, “Fox News Top-Rated Cable Channel for Eighth Straight Year,” The Hill, December 14, 2023, accessed February 17, 2024, URL:  https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4360708-fox-news-top-rated-cable-news-channel/#:~:text=Fox%20News%20took%20the%20crown,to%20Nielsen%20Media%20Research%20data.

[7] Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 154.  Emphasis added.

Although each teachers has their own teaching style, switching things up from time to time might assist students progress in the classroom. Kia Scott has worked in education for over a decade, assisting kids in not only learning the topics, but also applying what they've learned to become more modest, polite, and helpful to others. You don't have to fully modify your teaching approaches or lose your identity to be a dynamic teacher. All you have to do is follow the broad principles of modern classroom instruction and adapt your teaching style to fit.

Adapting one of the five recommended teaching styles can provide significant benefits. Changing your teaching style can help with the following: 

Encouraging pupils to participate actively in class.

Making studying more enjoyable for students to improve their learning process.

Making the kids more structured and disciplined.

Increasing student participation in lectures.

Students' communication abilities are being developed.

Assisting pupils in being more expressive and providing feedback.

Assuring that everyone in the class is behaving properly.

Adapting to the demands of a varied group of students.

MODULAR METHOD OF TEACHING

1. Introduction Modular teaching is one of the most widespread and recognizes teaching learning techniques in United States, Australia and many other Western countries including Asian region. Modular is used in almost all subjects like natural science, especially in biology and medical education and even in social sciences as well as in computers education. All kinds of subjects are being taught…