Learning Styles

Marlene LeFever

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781434704511
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Learning Styles is full of practical, helpful, and eye-opening information about the different ways kids perceive information and then use that knowledge, as well as how their behavior is often tied to their particular learning style. When we understand learning styles—imaginative, analytic, common sense, and dynamic—and adjust our teaching or parenting to those styles, we begin reaching everyone God gives us to teach.

Part I

UNDERSTANDING LEARNING STYLES

Some people learn by listening and sharing ideas, Some learn by thinking through ideas, Some learn by testing theories, And some learn by synthesizing content and context.
—Susan Morris, Excel, Inc.

Effective learning follows a natural process: (1) Learners begin with what they already know or feel or need. What happened before must provide the groundwork for what will happen now. Real learning cannot take place in a vacuum. (2) This real-life connection prepares them for the next step—learning something new. (3) In the third step, learners use the new content, practicing how it might work in real life. (4) The final step demands that learners creatively take what they have learned beyond the classroom. This final step moves students out of the church into their Monday-through-Friday lives.

Learning Styles in the Cycle

Each student will have a place in the cycle where he or she is most comfortable and can contribute the most excellent work. But even though different students prefer different places in the cycle, it’s important for all students to go through each of the four steps in the cycle.

To help explain the characteristics of people who prefer different places on the cycle, educator Bernice McCarthy has given them names. We will use these names throughout the book.

1. Imaginative Learners easily share from their past experience, providing a context for learning.

2. Analytic Learners need to learn something new in the lesson.

3. Common Sense Learners need to see if what they learned makes sense now.

4. Dynamic Learners find creative ways to use what they’ve learned.

Each Style Contributes

Not only is each person most comfortable in a particular style, but each style benefits the whole learning process.

Imaginative learners help answer the question, “Why do I need this?” They enjoy talking and sharing their life experiences. Without them, other students may not grasp the personal value of what will be taught.

Analytic learners help answer the question, “What does the Bible say about my need?” They enjoy learning new facts and concepts. Without them, other students may not build an intellectual understanding of the Bible.

Common sense learners help answer the question, “How does what the Bible teaches actually work?” They enjoy experimenting. Without them, other students may not practice how biblical values work today.

Dynamic learners help answer the question, “Now, how will I use what I have learned?” They enjoy finding creative ways to put faith into action. Without them, other students may not discover a “practical” faith.

Problem—Missed Steps

When any step is missed, the children, teens, and adults who prefer that step are also missed. There is no opportunity for them to show their natural abilities or to develop those abilities.

Is it any wonder they drop out of our church programs, and in many different ways, announce, “God didn’t make my mind right”?

These first two chapters provide an introduction to learning styles—your own and the styles of those you teach.

1

WHAT ARE LEARNING STYLES?

Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits.
All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful (I Corinthians 12:6).
—Eugene Peterson in The Message

God made my mind right!” I end many of my learning style training sessions by asking participants to say this sentence aloud three times, “God made my mind right!” The first time they say it to themselves as an affirmation of their own special style of learning. The second time, they turn to their neighbor and tell him or her in no uncertain terms, “God made my mind right!” Finally they say it as a prayer of thanks to their minds’ Maker.

Sometimes people break into spontaneous clapping after the three sentences. “I’ve never thanked God for my mind before,” a Sunday school teacher said. “I’ve really got a pretty special one, you know!” Sometimes people will cry. “I thought there was something wrong with me. Now I know God can use my unique ‘smarts’!”

Knowing about your learning style can change your opinion of yourself and what you are willing to attempt for Jesus. Knowing about learning styles helps you teach all the children, teens, and adults God put in your classroom.

A learning style is the way in which a person sees or perceives things best and then processes or uses what has been seen. Each person’s individual learning style is as unique as a signature. When a person has something difficult to learn, that student learns faster and enjoys learning more if his or her unique learning style is affirmed by the way the teacher teaches.

Students learn faster and enjoy learning more if their unique learning styles are affirmed.

As Christian educators, teaching to our students’ learning styles can help all students get more excited about the subject, explore and understand the facts, enjoy grappling with the implications and, most importantly, be more willing to put what they have learned into practice.

The heart of our curriculum, what we want to teach, is the message of Christ—His love for us, His willingness to accept us into His family, and how we live out our responsibilities as His family members. What a challenge! Christ gives us what we are to teach—the content—but the “how” of teaching He leaves up to us. We must make the most of what we know about learning and the methods that communicate effectively with students. Often the wrong “how” can keep our students from hearing the “what.”

I was helping to serve a Thanksgiving dinner to a group of street people at a mission in Chicago. Throughout the meal a man wandered around the room muttering to himself. Much of what he said was gibberish. Then his eyes focused on me. He came charging at me, his voice loud and his English clear. “Who do you think I am?” he bellowed at me. “Somebody?”

I was too surprised and frightened to make any response, and almost immediately he went back to muttering words only he could understand. Later that day, I was rethinking what happened and wishing I had had the presence of mind to answer his question. “Yes, that’s exactly what I think,” I wish I had said. “I think you are somebody—somebody Christ loves. That’s why I’m here.”

His question is asked in many different ways by our students, and often by members of our own families—”Who do you think I am?” their participation, attitudes, and body language ask. “Somebody?”

We answer each one, in part, by the way we respond. When we teach in ways that capture a student’s strengths, we are indeed saying, “Yes, that’s why I’m here. For Jesus’ sake, I believe you are somebody. I will teach you in a way that affirms your strengths and helps you believe, as I do, that you are someone special.”

“When we decide we want to value differences,” writes educator Pat Burke Guild, “we will make decisions that expand diversity rather than seek uniformity and inappropriate conformity.”¹ Successful teachers no longer believe that what’s good for one is good for all. Likewise, we must stop looking for the one best way to do Christian education.

Enlarging Our View of Learning

Everyone has a learning style.

A person’s preferred style has nothing to do with IQ, socioeconomic background, or achievement level. It doesn’t matter if Janet, for example, has the potential to make A’s or C’s in school. If she has opportunities to show what she can contribute within her preferred style she is more likely to succeed to her full potential. Each person’s style contains clues for developing natural abilities to the highest level. When Janet is successful in her preferred style, she will be willing to dare things that fall outside her strength area. On the other hand, if Janet is never taught within her preferred style, she may assume she’s dumb or that her contributions have no value. She may give up, or even drop out.

Until recently, many Christian communicators assumed that the most effective ways to teach were teacher-centered—through lecture, story-telling, or sermon. If the teacher is talking, teachers thought, the students must be learning. We taught as if we could just slice off the students’ heads and pour in everything they needed to know. That assumption contains some truth for some students, but is absolutely false for others. For most students, as we poured in the need-to-know stuff, it dribbled right out of a hole in their big to...