Teaching styles and learning styles

Article suggests matching teaching style to students' learning style does no good ~ Adjunct Law Prof blog comments on Chronicle article.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed. reported yesterday on new research suggesting that matching one's teaching style to students' learning style doesn't help them learn better. Most, if not all of us who teach, have been told about the importance of recognizing that our students have different learning styles (i.e. visual, kinestic, aural, etc.) and the importance of the teacher adopting congruent teaching techniques in order to reach all of our students. And I'm also guessing that just about everyone, including myself, has taken that advice at face value because it seems so self-evident there was never a reason to question it.

But now some researchers have published a paper suggesting that although each of us has a different learning style, there is no empirical evidence to support the assumption that students learn best when their teacher tries to match those individual styles. As expected, the paper has drawn critics who argue that the researchers have missed, or failed to take into account, several important papers on the importance of matching teaching style to learning style. Among them is

Extensive reading: why it is good for our students… and for us. | Teaching English | British Council | BBC

An article by Alan Maley posted to BBC's Teaching English, 9 December, 2009: "Extensive reading: why it is good for our students… and for us." In this, the first of two articles for TeachingEnglish, Alan Maley considers the benefits extensive reading can bring to English language learners and teachers.

What is Extensive Reading (ER)?
Extensive Reading is often referred to but it is worth checking on what it actually involves. Richard Day has provided a list of key characteristics of ER (Day 2002). This is complemented by Philip Prowse (2002). Maley (2008) deals with ER comprehensively. The following is a digest of the two lists of factors or principles for successful ER:

1. Students read a lot and read often.
2. There is a wide variety of text types and topics to choose from.
3. The texts are not just interesting: they are engaging/ compelling.
4. Students choose what to read.
5. Reading purposes focus on: pleasure, information and general understanding.
6. Reading is its own reward.
7. There are no tests, no exercises, no questions and no dictionaries.
8. Materials are within the language competence of the students.
9. Reading is individual, and silent.
10. Speed is faster, not deliberate and slow.
11. The teacher explains the goals and procedures clearly, then monitors and guides the students.
12. The teacher is a role model…a reader, who participates along with the students.

The model is very much like that for L1 reading proposed by Atwell (2006). It has been variously described as Free Voluntary Reading (FEVER), Uninterrupted Silent Reading (USR), Sustained Silent Reading (SSR), Drop Everything and Read (DEAR), or Positive Outcomes While Enjoying Reading (POWER).

So what are the benefits of ER?
Both common sense observation and copious research evidence bear out the many benefits which come from ER (Waring 2000, 2006). There are useful summaries of the evidence in Day and Bamford (1998: 32-39) and The Special Issue of The Language Teacher (1997) including articles by Paul Nation and others, and passionate advocacy in Krashen’s The Power of Reading. (2004). The journals Reading in a Foreign Language and the International Journal of Foreign Language Learning are also good sources of research studies supporting ER. (see references for websites) And there is the indispensable annotated bibliography, http://www.extensivereading.net/er/biblio2.html

So what does it all add up to? Read the article and find out. How does ER relate to computers or writing?

Extensive reading: why it is good for our students… and for us. | Teaching English | British Council | BBC

Why I Put Core Knowledge in the Bottom Left

... and the next installment...

Why I Put Core Knowledge in the Bottom Left via Tuttle SVC by noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) on 12/14/09

E.D. Hirsch, from the Core Knowledge website:

Apologists for the current state of public schools continue to blame the persistent achievement gap between ethnic and racial groups on social conditions or on shortcomings in the innate abilities of some groups. But the proof that such social and psychological determinism is false is the fact that the achievement gap between social and racial groups has been greatly reduced in France and other democracies. If social or IQ determinism were true, then the educational success of those nations would be impossible. It is no accident that progressivism never took hold in nations which have greatly narrowed the test-score gap between groups. By criticizing progressivism, I don't of course criticize its emphasis on humane, lively, and imaginative teaching. That has been a hallmark of good education in all times and places. I mean only to criticize its all-too-successful attack on traditional academic subject matter as being boring, useless, and even soul-deadening.
Let me remind you of the founding idea of democratic education as it was envisaged after the great democratic revolutions in Europe and America first by thinkers like Jefferson, then by Horace Mann and W.E.B. Du Bois. They wanted the focus of the schools to be on strong content in history, science, mathematics, and the arts. Those subjects were to form the common content which everyone learned. Commonality of content was the essence of the so-called "common school." The idea was that schooling should enable every person to stand on his or her own two feet, equal to every other person of similar talent and virtue, rather than, as in the past, having one's role in life determined by the status, wealth, or education of one's parents. This democratic ideal was shared by all the great founders of democratic education everywhere in the world. The common school was to be a place where children of all races and conditions would be offered the same opportunity to amplify their talents. How far short of this ideal our schools have fallen in the 20th century is highlighted by the degree to which other democracies have lived up so much better than we have to this egalitarian ideal.
They have achieved this by two basic policies that are directly opposed to the principles of progressive education — first, they have determined that the emphasis of schooling should fall on the academic curriculum, not on slogans about growth, critical thinking, and individually tailored study plans — and second, that all children should share a core of common intellectual capital. The most acute thinkers about democratic education, including Jefferson, Horace Mann, and Du Bois, believed that it is not intelligence that increases knowledge but knowledge that increases intelligence. Du Bois, who was himself the product of the New England common school, would have scorned the sentimental absurdity that each child must have his or her own special curriculum suited to his or her special personality. (emphasis added)

See discussion...

You can't speed read literature

 

 

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You can't speed read literature

via Culture | guardian.co.uk by Evan Maloney on 12/15/09

Speed-reading might be useful for commercial documents, but when it comes to serious writing, it blurs out all the really interesting stuff

The celebrated academic Harold Bloom is a lightning fast reader; blink and he's probably turned the page – twice. In his prime he could churn through 1,000 pages an hour, which means he could have digested Jane Eyre during his lunch break and still had time to chew through half of Ulysses before returning to classes. I don't know about you, but that makes me feel like a slow, slack-jawed simian struggling in the frontal-lobe department.

The average reader snails through prose at a rate of about 250-300 words per minute, which roughly equates to about one page per minute. Bloom is surely cut from a rare cloth of reading comprehension because he whips through more than 16 pages per minute and still remembers almost everything he reads. For the rest of us, it's not so easy. In the World Championship Speed Reading Competition the top contestants typically read around 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute, but only manage about 50% comprehension. That's just not good enough for literature. What's the point if you're reading, say, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, with its panoply of characters, and you only understand only 50% of the text? You wouldn't be able to understand anything much at all.

Do people really attempt to speed read literature? If so, why? I guess, most simply, it is so a person can boast about how much they've read – or how often. Andrew Marr claims to have read War and Peace "at least" 15 times. Not 12 or 13, but 15. I read this and thought, well, if you took out all the passages he's skimmed over, he's probably only read it 10. Even so, it is a remarkable achievement. I found it difficult to concentrate on certain passages of War and Peace the first (and only) time I read it. I can't imagine reading over those same passages 15 times and paying attention.

Most speed reading courses teach people to read the words off the page without imagining the corresponding sounds in their minds (called subvocalisation). Skim reading is slightly different; it teaches people to read the keywords in a sentence and ignore all the smaller words, creating some kind of semantic register in shorthand. Anyone who has read that other Tolstoy tome, Anna Karenina, has probably been tempted to skim read certain passages, such as Levin's theories of Russian agrarianism. I know I was tempted, quite recently, but in my efforts to pick up the reading pace I found my attention was divided: part of my mind was thinking about Levin's thoughts and actions, as described on the page, but an equal part of my mind was devoted to the novel process of speed/skim reading. What are the keywords? I wondered. Sometimes my mind was entirely distracted by this question, and while debating which half of a subjunctive conditional I could ignore while retaining the sense of the clause, I would speed read two or three more paragraphs without taking anything in.

There is something quite unseemly about the notion of skimming over the literary canon. In some inverted, abstract sense it reminds me of liposuction: you're putting on intellectual weight without acquiring the mental health benefits, and there's always a downside to cutting corners.

Did the world's great novelists really spend years agonising over the pitch and rhythm of their sentences so some time-efficient post-modern reader could skim over the text like a political spin doctor searching for soundbites in the transcript of a ministerial speech? I don't think so. Speed reading might be an effective tool for office documents, textbooks, and letters of unrequited love, but the prose of great literature should be savoured, should it not? Part of the joy of reading comes from "hearing" our psychic palates pronouncing the words in the mind's ear; the imagined speech, "richly flavoured like a nut or an apple".

Compare this classic Dickensian opening line with the skimmed version that follows, and ask yourself, is it really worth tearing through great prose like Gordon Gecko tearing through the assets of a newly acquired company?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

 
– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
 

Best times/worst times, age wisdom/foolishness, epoch belief/incredulity, season Light/Darkness, spring hope, winter despair.

 
Charles Dickens, the skimmed version.

Notwithstanding the aesthetic pleasure derived from reading, how well can one appreciate the nuances of character and circumstance in a novel if one is reading 10 pages per minutes sans Bloomian comprehension skills? I'm not convinced that the average person can ever learn to read at speed and contemplate at leisure. Speed reading is a bit like trying to appreciate the sights of Paris while racing through the streets at 200 kmph.

I know this is the era in which we measure internet connection speeds in fractions of seconds and thumb SMS sentiments like "gr8 2 c u", I know this is the era of speed-living and 20-20 cricket, but I'm not convinced that we should adapt our reading habits to fit in with the speed of modern life. Rather, reading should be seen as a pleasure where time is forgotten, if only for a moment.

Evan Maloney

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A Good Enough Schematic of US School Reform

Not exactly about computers, writing, language ~ but not inimical the subject either. This and the next post reblogged from Tuttle SVC blog (serendipitously encountered via Vlorbik's Open a Vein) do go to traditional vs progressive.

 

 

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A Good Enough Schematic of US School Reform

via Tuttle SVC by noreply@blogger.com (Tom Hoffman) on 12/11/09

This is pretty much the universe as I see it. The upper left needs a better name or representative organization. I considered "no excuses" but I don't think that's quite it.

One thing about this graph is that each quadrant tends to be ambivalent toward the ones they share a border with and save their attacks for the ones diagonally across from them. Also the top tends to ignore or try to avoid fights with the bottom.

 

 

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