Teaching Styles As an elementary physical educator I have always believed experiential, play based learning opportunities for the students that are meaningful to them. Everything I plan has to meet my needs for it to create an experience for the students that is fun, challenging, develops skills, is delightful (creates memories), includes social interactions, and is personally relevant to the children. Not every student will experience one or more of these every class, but in general my expectation of my teaching is that I hit on something for each of them every time. In class we were sent to try out the Teacher Perspectives Inventory (TPI) My impression of online survey style reflections has always been a critical one. They are typically very transparent in what they are trying to do and results can be manipulated with ease if you pay attention. What I did to "try" to avoid this was not read anything about the TPI (it was new to me) until after I completed it. Of course, it was pretty easy to see which statements were going to go together in each situation, but at least I wasn't entirely sure what I was evaluating or how it would be categorized. Review my results from this tool below. I found it interesting that in all cases my areas that the Belief, Intention and Action scores were always within 2 if not the same, indicating significant congruence in my beliefs, intention and action in the gym. I think this likely comes from experience and years of teaching. Through two masters programs and 20+ years in education my way of doing things hasn't changed a lot with respect to what I believe is the way to teach kids fundamental movement skills, other athletic skills, and social skills. Learning Styles Howard Gardiners Theory of Multiple Intelligences has dominated the approach to teaching for many in the years I have been an educator. I was never a big fan, but when told to follow along would do as instructed. The ideas of pigeon holing learners didn't sit well with me and in reflecting on how I learn myself I felt it was a little to restrictive. However, the bigger picture of addressing the needs of everyone as a learner is critical. I think over time his work has been taken too literally and many teachers have found trouble trying to teach to each of his learner styles each class all the time, and I do not think that is his intent. My approach is simple, I use a variety of instructional methods that use visual, auditory, physical, verbal, social, solitary and logical aspects to them. Not every time, but over a term or year students will be exposed to them all. I think that this is critical. Just because I learn better in a kinesthetic way does not mean I only learn that way. I must be exposed to all of the ways in order to be a more complete learner. Ways of learning are different for everyone, who needs a hand on the shoulder vs verbal feedback? Which students will respond to me physically manipulating their body through a movement skill vs explaining the skill vs showing them a video or personally demonstrating the skill? These are always questions running through my head in the gym. I was introduced to this blog post during the discussions in class. I found it resonated with me. "The Zombie of Instructional Design and Teaching: Learning Styles" by Rob Power. It is a short read and rebukes the use of Gardiner's theory. Sources:
Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (2020). Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. In Instructional guide for university faculty and teaching assistants. Retrieved from https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide Power, Rob. (February 5, 2019) "The Zombie of Instructional Design and Teaching: Learning Styles". Power Learning solutions Blog. Teacher Perspectives Inventory retrieved from www.teachingperspectives.com/tpi/ Comments are closed.
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