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Studies Find There’s No Such Thing as Learning Styles – As Teachers, Should We Care?

heather — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:00:44 +0000

According to Psychcentral.com, “Learning Styles are being re-evaluated” and negated. This theory, according to a recently published journal article claims that there is really no research out there to prove that students learn differently from one another.

Shrug. Cue eye roll.(...)
Read the rest of Studies Find There’s No Such Thing as Learning Styles – As Teachers, Should We Care? (956 words)

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2009. | Permalink | 24 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: differentiation, learning styles, multi, multiple-intelligences, standardization, syn-naps, test scores

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Imagine Magazine: Your Slice of the Multiple Intelligences Pie

heather — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:49:57 +0000

I’m a semi-regular contributor to Imagine Magazine, a print periodical published by Johns Hopkins University and marketed to Gifted Middle Schoolers. The beauty of this magazine is in how it talks to kids. It takes high-level concepts and delivers them in a straightforward, high-level way, never bringing the topics down in voice or tone.

Rather, Imagine Magazine has accomplished what many cannot when it comes to relating to tweens and teens, it educates without being patronizing.

I’ve written a few articles in my time for them and it’s always a pleasure to contribute to a publication one can so whole-heartedly believe in.

It’s also wonderful to be a working writer and a teacher of writing so that I can share my own writing process with my students. Today, for instance, as my students were finishing up their own revisions on their narrative essays, I got to talk about the number of revisions it took me before I turned in the final draft of this particular article.

I happen to really like this most recent article appearing in the Sep/Oct edition entitled, “Your Slice of the M.I. Pie.” I like it because I think it doesn’t just give a clear description of Howard Gardner’s Multiple-Intelligences, it gives the reasons why one would even seek to find out their slice in the first place.

Anyway, I really love the magazine and I’m always proud to be a part of their issues. Give it a look-sie and let me know if you think as highly of this magazine as I do.

To read the article, click here.

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: howard gardner, imagine magazine, k12, middle school, multiple-intelligences, teens, tweens

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Costa’s Levels of Questioning and Student-Designed Assessments

heather — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 01:41:37 +0000

So this week I introduced Costa’s Levels of Questioning to my students. We have some teachers on my site talking about these triggers of metacognition so it compliments everyone’s efforts to enter this discussion in the classroom. Costa’s is, in a nutshell, a more staccato version of Bloom’s, making it more accessible to more students. Rather than talk using a vocabulary of 6 categories of learning, we muscle it down to three. No matter, it’s the discussion that counts.

I begin my lesson by asking them why people go to the gym. “To work out their muscles,” a student inevitably says.(...)
Read the rest of Costa’s Levels of Questioning and Student-Designed Assessments (865 words)

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: assessments, bloom's, costa's levels, differentiation, multiple-intelligences, student-driven instrustion

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Facebook Quizzes and Lesson Planning

heather — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:05:16 +0000

It used to be 4 colors that defined the differences between personalities: gold, blue, green, and orange. Then it advanced to 8 slices of a pie used to categorize the different intelligences: linguistic, logical, naturalistic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual/spatial, kinesthetic, musical. There are also 3 defined learning styles: auditory, visual, and tactile.

But in the world of Facebook, you are infinitely defined by any thematic quiz you could imagine. And the way I see it, it’s just the same old, same old personality type quiz…but more tailored to you. In other words…differentiated.

For instance, according to the Facebook world of personality quizzes, I am the following (like in Jeopardy, try to think of the question that goes with the answer):

Water

Viola

A Hobbit

Jean Grey

Prof. Lupin

I have no real idea what all this information really means about me, but it’s a fun way to kill a couple of commercial break minutes during “So You Think You Can Dance,” does it not?

Anyway, all these quizzes got me thinking. If you are a teacher using a multiple intelligences quiz in your classroom with your students, maybe it would be worthwhile, from a student choice/student ownership point of view, to have students develop their own quizzes of sorts. Perhaps they can design their own topics of categorization and administer these quizzes to other students? Would that not add additional ownership towards reflection?

I guess what I’m picturing is students gathering their own information about characters from books they’ve read during the year: traits, internal conflicts, flaws, life themes, skills, etc…and developing some kind of Facebook-esque flowchart that allows fellow students to follow a path towards a given answer. Then the quiz author must provide a concise paragraph description of that character to distribute to students who qualify as that character.

If I understand it properly, to produce something like this offline, a student might only need index cards to create a flowchart to track answers towards the end. Online, however, a student might use a program like this one.

I can see the value in this lesson and activity. It serves as a review of a book or perhaps even covers the standard of Multiple Works By A Single Author. The creation of the quiz itself is a differentiated assessment of the student who writes it. It’s a cross-curricular assessment possibility:

Science: What Planet Are You? (applying science, mythology, and character traits to the planets)

History: Which English Monarch Are You? Caesar? Inventor?

Language Arts: Which Book That We’re Read This Year?

Math: Which Algorithm Are You? (assigning traits to different equations as well as understanding the purposes behind their discoveries)

As I’ve noted before, lessons can come from wacky places. Keep your ears and eyes open, and you’ll have fresh lessons to start the new year off in an interesting way both for you and your students.

© heather for tweenteacher.com, 2009. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: assessments, briggs-meyers, cross-curricular, differentiation, facebook, lesson planning, multiple-intelligences, quizzes, standards

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