Diversifying Teaching Styles to Meet the Needs of All Learners

Diversifying Teaching Styles to Meet the Needs of All Learners

When researching about education, one often finds a great deal of literature and information about learning styles. Educators spend countless hours studying their students in order to find out how they learn best. All students have needs when it comes to how they learn and educators must be able to meet those needs in order to promote successful learning in their classrooms. This (paper/article) will focus on teaching strategies and how to vary them so that each learning style preference is addressed, therefore increasing the level of achievement of each student and making learning a successful outcome in the classroom.

Strategies, or methods of instruction, include the ways in which the content/information is transformed into new learning for the students. The content can be transformed directly from the teacher to the student through lecture, demonstration, drill and questioning, or more indirectly where the teacher's role is to facilitate learning situations through grouping, discovery, inquiry, role-play and simulations (Freiberg, Driscoll, 1996). Wilen, Ishler, Hutchison, and Kindsvatter (2000) stress that building a positive, supportive learning environment is an important goal for all teachers who want their students to succeed in learning. To maintain student interest and achieve higher results, they encourage teachers to use a variety of methods. They suggest four strategies for "generating an academic climate" in the classroom (p. 30): 1) be task oriented and aware of time. Teachers often find themselves in a situation, which limits the amount of time they can spend on a certain topic. Therefore, it is recommended that teachers try to rema...

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