Exploring Learning Styles: Developing a Flexible Teaching Approach. (Pedagogy Saturday VI).

The sixth annual Pedagogy Saturday was titled "Exploring Learning Styles: Developing A Flexible Teaching Approach." This all-day event was devoted to an in-depth study of how different students learn, and how to reflect those differences in our teaching approaches. For most teachers, the "default" teaching style is a combination of how we were taught and our own learning style. With some students, this can be quite successful; but many of our students will have a different learning style than us, and we must learn how to adjust our approach. Pedagogy Saturday VI addressed this issue from the viewpoints of both learning styles and child development.

The opening session was a high-energy presentation by Earl Oremus, the headmaster of Marburn Academy, a school especially designed for children with learning differences such as dyslexia and AD/HD. Oremus explained how teachers could use his intuitive/non-intuitive learner concept to create successful learning experiences for their non-intuitive students. This was followed by two sets of four concurrent breakout sessions presented by experts in the field of child development: Kenneth Guilmartin, The Very Young Beginner; Donna Brink Fox, The Elementary-Aged Student; Kim Dolgin, The Adolescent Student; and Judith Piercy, The College Student. Following the lunchtime round table discussions, moderated by Tom Pearsall, Educational Psychologist Keith Golay presented the "Temperament Teaching Model." This model described how to increase student achievement by teaching to temperament-based learning styles. In this session participants identified their own personality type and explored the implications it had for teaching and learning. The next session returned to the child development ...