Students are made up of different kinds of learners. Some benefit from seeing information, some benefit from hearing it and some benefit from actions. This raises the question of how we must approach teaching to ensure we are catering to each student’s learning needs.
Find out about different learning styles found in students and the range of activities you can include in each lesson to help them all.
Visual learners
Visual learners retain information best when they have watched and observed it. Therefore, approaches to teaching them in the classroom must be centred around visually-stimulating materials.
Examples of these are videos, diagrams, displays and flashcards, but how these learners pick up information can go beyond just materials. Visual learners are also aided by watching someone do the task they are trying to do. For example, if you are teaching an art class, they will best perform the painting task if you demonstrate how to do it first.
Having lists of instructions is also helpful for visual learners, as they are able to refer back to something they can read at any point.
Auditory learners
Hearing information is what will allow auditory learners to best remember it. Speech and sounds should be incorporated into lessons in order to boost these learners’ progress.
Engage an auditory learner in conversation about the topic they are studying and they will remember what you have said and easily then follow any instructions. For revision purposes, make audio clips of you talking through a topic for learners to listen to or create a list of educational podcasts they can learn from.
Kinaesthetic learners
With kinaesthetic learners, it is all about doing. For these types of learners, the best way to remember something is by doing an action associated with it and by practising!
A great activity to use in lessons for kinaesthetic learners is role play. For example, when teaching students about how temperature affects the movement of particles, get them out of their seats to move around as the particles in hypothetical cold, lukewarm and hot settings!
Tracing and writing words is also a beneficial way of learning for many kinaesthetic learners.
Reading and writing learners
Perhaps best suited to traditional classroom teaching are reading and writing learners. These learners will most effectively remember information when they, well, read it and write it down.
To make learning engaging and effective for these students, try out different types of writing tasks. Instead of just getting students to write notes of a topic, you can set them the task of writing the information as a letter to an imaginary figurehead or get students to make a quiz out on the topic for their fellow classmates to answer.
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