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Learning Styles based on Riding

This is a new way of looking at learning styles that i havent encountered before. I thought it was rather interesting as it was quite different and much simpler than Gardners Multiple Intelligences. I believe it is based on a person called Ridings work.



Some basic views on learning styles are:



Some people will prefer to have information presented to them as a whole while others will want the details



Some people will prefer to have information presented in text or speech while others would want pictures



Some people prefer to learn by doing while others would wish to think about the information before acting



Some people prefer to understand the theory before acting while others would prefer to act



These are very simple descriptions of learning styles and in practice people have a mixture of them with some characteristics being more pronounced than others.

Learning Style

My learning style is dominantly intrapersonal and visual, thus it occurs in the Introspective Domain. It is very important to know your own learning stlye and that of the students you are teaching as it makes for a much more effective teaching strategy. You can make sure you have catered for most people in the class, to ensure for maximum learning capacity. The idea of creatig 3 domains out of the 9 intelligences means it makes t much easier to teach to all students in a lesson.
The different learning stlyes are listed below, but for those visual learners, the following pie chart shows the 9 stages simplified into 3 domains. The following wheel can be found at http://www.surfaquarium.com/mi/mi_domains.htm
VISUAL/SPATIAL - learning visually and organizing ideas spatially. Seeing concepts in action in order to understand them. The ability to "see" things in one's mind in planning to create a product or solve a problem.

VERBAL/LINGUISTIC - learning through the spoken and written word. This intelligence was always valued in the traditional classroom and in traditional assessments of intelligence and achievement.

MATHEMATICAL/LOGICAL - learning through reasoning and problem solving. Also highly valued in the traditional classroom, where students were asked to adapt to logically sequenced delivery of instruction.

BODILY/KINESTHETIC - learning through interaction with one's environment. This intelligence is not the domain of "overly active" learners. It promotes understanding through concrete experience.

MUSICAL/RHYTHMIC - learning through patterns, rhythms and music. This includes not only auditory learning, but the identification of patterns through all the senses.

INTRAPERSONAL - learning through feelings, values and attitudes. This is a decidedly affective component of learning through which students place value on what they learn and take ownership for their learning.

INTERPERSONAL - learning through interaction with others. Not the domain of children who are simply "talkative" or "overly social." This intelligence promotes collaboration and working cooperatively with others.

NATURALIST - learning through classification, categories and hierarchies. The naturalist intelligence picks up on subtle differences in meaning. It is not simply the study of nature; it can be used in all areas of study.

EXISTENTIAL - learning by seeing the "big picture": "Why are we here?" "What is my role in the world?" "What is my place in my family, school and community?" This intelligence seeks connections to real world understandings and applications of new learning.

Useful Websites and Educational Games

Websites that are useful in creating lesson plans with Gardner's Multiple Intelligences in mind.

www.cyke.com - A website that addresses children psychological problems, with a space for kids to play games that help them understand their emotions

www.teachers.ash.org.au/researchskills/dalton.htm - A website that explains ways of implementing Blooms taxonomy in the classroom and examples of tasks that can be given to students.

www.surfaquarium.com/mi/intelligences.htm - This site has an incredible range of games and activities that students can use to learn through their preferred learning styles.

This last website is full of games and activites to stimulate learning in children. They are divided into each of the learning stlyes. It would therefore be useful for all types of learners as it caters to them all, not just kinaesthetic or visual. This website would be useful for fast workers in a classroom, as it could help fill in time for them whilst still being educational. It has the added bonus that when a learner, say visual, recieves stimulation in that area, such as playing visual games on the internet, they are much more receptive to learning even once they have moved on from playing the games.

Educational Blog

This is a blog i found by David Truss, a teacher (i presume) from Canada. It has lots of different posts on education and an interesting post on his ideas about Marc Prenskys article on Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.

http://eduspaces.net/dtruss/weblog/147741.html

Characteristics of a Good Blog

1. Clear and concise (no waffling)
2. Individualistic
3. Has plenty of pictures, diagrams, hyperlinks and other stimuli
4. Information is correct and current
5. Information is intersting and requires the reader to engage in higher order thinking

Summary of Stephen Downes Blog

Stephen Downes Blog

Stephen Downes' blog shows his ideas on the question of how do we make thigns flow? According to Downes, we dont make thing flow, but rather we find something flowing already and go with it. He believes that we cant make things happen by directing the outcome through managment ( what he calls the management fallacy), but rather the outcome is already emergent and we simply help the process along. The web is like the wave, you ride it, you ride with it and go where it takes you, you cant direct the wave. Downes finally though is that the flow will finally occur when we stop trying to make it happen in others and let it happen in ourselves.

Stephen's Podcast
Whilst it is possible to read most of stephen Downe's work, for those of you who are aural learners, this podcast will help you understand his topic much more easily than reading a posting or essay.

Learning Styles and ICT

Find out your own learning style:
http://agelesslearner.com/assess/learningstyle.html

This is an awesome test that shows you your learning styles.

http://www2.bgfl.org/bgfl2/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks1/ict/mulitple_int/questions/choose_lang.cfm

Hi guys just thought you should read this...
What would it have been like if this was done at 8pm last night???
Well this could have been an interesting phone conversation, alot of swearing and some laughing about how stupid we are because we can't do it. Then the questions would have come flying 'how did you do that?' 'what does your screen look like?' 'how come mine doesn't look like that?' 'what's wrong with my #$!* *^#$@!* computer?'. This could have been a disaster last night, but because we were all sitting here helping each other we were talking it through. Guys this is SOCIAL INTERATCTION at its best. We are now a community, an online community who would have thought... Communicating in person and with a screen infront of the both of you is so much easier than over the phone, where little, stupid mistakes are easily missed.

What would it be like if this was done at 8pm last night?

To set up the netwotrking between blogs last night would have required a lot of communication and interaction betwen people. There would be constant phone calls of 'have you added me' 'how did you do that' i cant see your post' 'i cant do this' etc. MSN would have come into play greatly as it is the primary form of communication online between students these days. Whilst we were networking with others we would be conversing on MSN with friends, reading emails, searching the net, listening to music and probably been talked at by parents. It is interesting to note that all this constant stimulation and multi tasking would probably not have distracted from the learning involved through connecting in blogger as we are quite used to it by now. However, being able to talk in person today and see each others computer and see how they did things made it so much easier as we learnt from each other and taught each other how to do it properly and quickly. Communicating in person is much more effective then communitcating online where small nuances are easy to miss.

Assessment Post 5 - Piaget

The four development stages are described in Piaget's theory as
Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)
Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills)
Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
Formal operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).

Each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period, and each but the last is an inadequate approximation of reality. Development from one stage to the next is therefore caused by the accumulation of errors in the child's understanding of the environment; this accumulation eventually causes such a degree of cognitive disequilibrium that thought structures require reorganising.

Reflective Thinking

Most educational theorists focus on childrens age rather then a stage in life, which makes this theory kind of unique. A way to interpret part of the theory that states that accumulation of errors causes a change in the way the child thinks, is that errors in a childs work is an important part of their education. If a child fails in a chemistry experiment a few times, they must work on a new approach and condsider it from new angles to work out a way to succeed. This causes reflective thinking and uses higher order skills such as evaluating, rather than a student succeeding the first time and moving on without really thinking or condsidering how it works or how to make it work differently.

Coginitive Tools

www.educationau.edu.au/archives/CP/REFS/rowe_cogtools.htm

Personal Computing: A Source of Powerful Cognitive Tools

Helga A.H Rowe

Cognitive tools help learners with complex cognitive learning activities and critical thinking. These tools are learner controlled: They construct their knowledge themselves using the tools rather than memorizing knowledge.

Examples of these cognitive tools are Inspiration (which requires students to mind map), databases, spreadsheets, semantic networks, expert systems, communications software such as teleconferencing programs, on-line collaborative knowledge construction environments, multimedia/ hypermedia construction software, and computer programming languages.

Mind map summary of Mark Prenskys article 'Digital Natives, Digital immigrants'

Assessment Post 4 - Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom's Taxonomy

Blooms taxonomy shows the levels of thinking from basic to higher order thinking. The skills involved in remembering and understanding are quite limited compared to creating or evaluating. In the past, schools have concentrated mainly on the lower order skills such as understanding and applying, yet rarely reaching evaluating or creating. In light of Bloom's research, many teachers are realising that these higher order skills are needed to create true deep learning in students. The idea of creating is new to Bloom's taxonomy as it used to stop at evaluating. However, through further research and study, it became obvious that creating needed more skill and higher thinking that it became vital as a part of a well rounded, deep learning education. It should be remembered however that remembering and understanding are both vitally important still as they build the bases and foundation of learning, thus why they form the foundation of the pyramid.

Assessment Post 3 - Lev Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky

Vygotsky's research concerned a child's development through social interaction and its importance in defining their actions and behaviours. Vygotsky observed how higher mental functions developed through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults. Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of their culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other knowledge through which the child learns to develop their own skills.

Vygotsky (1978) states:

"Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first,
on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people
(interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This
applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation
of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between
individuals."

Reflective Ideas

The idea central to Vygotsky's theory is that development occurs through social
interaction with adults and other children. This means that childrens
social interaction at school is vital and must be nurtured. Activites such as group work may be helpful in this situation as the interaction involved in it means that the children are engaging in thinking together and often help each other develop necessary skills. An interesting side effect of this would be that the students learn social skills and social roles ( such as a leader, thinker, doer etc in a group situation) in the process of learning academic information.

Assessment Post 2 - William Glasser

According to William Glasser, there are 5 motivating factors to learn. To fulfil these 5 basic needs, students need to feel love and belonging and this is vitally important to their development.
These include

1. Shelter/protection/survival
2. Love/friendships/relationships
3. Fun
4. Power
5. Freedom

The Ten Axioms of Choice Theory

• The only person whose behaviour we can control is our own.
• All we can give another person is information.
• All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
• The problem relationship is always part of our present life.
• All we do is behave.
• What happened in the past has everything to do with what we are today, but we can only satisfy our basic needs right now and plan to continue satisfying them in the future.
• We can only satisfy our needs by satisfying the pictures in our Quality World.
• All behaviour is Total Behaviour and is made up of four components: acting, thinking, feeling and physiology.
• All Total Behaviour is designated by verbs and named by the part that is the most recognizable.
• All Total Behaviour is chosen, but we only have direct control over the acting and thinking components. We can only control our feeling and physiology indirectly through how we choose to act and think
  
  

Assessment Post 1 - John Hattie

According to Hattie, the influences on a child's education differ greatly in importance. The students themselves contribute 50% to their education, the teachers 25% and the remaining 25% is influenced by their home, school and peers. Hattie believes the 6 biggest motivations for a student to learn are:

• feedback
• prior cognitive ability (such as IQ score)
• instructional quality
• instructional quantity (how much and how long they are taught)
• direct instruction (interaction in classroom learning)
• acceleration.

http://www.acer.edu.au/workshops/documents/HattieSlides.pdf
http://www.teacherstoolbox.co.uk/downloads/managers/GeoffonHattie.doc

John Hatties ideas are important for teachers to study and understand as it gives an insight into what effect outside influences can have on how much students learn and thus how to affect their potential grades for the better. Feedback is obviously an important point as the child learns what mistakes they have made and where their strengths and weaknesses are. It is interesting though that this is above instructional quality as many people believe the abilities of the teacher to be the most important thing.