Week 9: Learning styles

Dear colleagues,

The ninth week of our course provided discussing learning styles. I found this subject very interesting and it was a surprise for me to discover that Gardner listed 9 intelligences in his theory (I thought they were 5-6).

Although there are scholars who criticize Gardner’s ideas as lacking empirical evidence, in my opinion this does not make his approach less helpful for teachers. Knowing better our students’ interests, talents and needs will help us design activities matching their preferred learning styles and strengths and they will have better attitudes, better grades in tests- they will learn more efficiently in one word. The learners will feel motivated because they will have the occasion to demonstrate their strengths, they will act as “specialists” and this fact will increase their self-esteem.

It is true that many educational systems still focus on the linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligences nowadays because it is considered that we should be able to read, write and make calculations first of all. But if we want to have better results we will use a variety of teaching methods appealing to each intelligence to accommodate different learning styles.

These activities will challenge students to learn in different ways and using all approaches they will become more effective learners. They will be better served  by an approach where teachers use different activities to reach all students not just those who excel at linguistic and logical intelligence. 

Best regards,

Ion