Survey // How do you learn best?
When I took over my first class of sophomores in the fall, I had them fill out a survey about their own learning styles and experiences with English. One of the questions on the survey asked, “How do you learn best?” I organized their responses into seven categories: teacher explanation/taking notes, acting/presentations, visual, reading/study guides, group work, fun/not boring, and no response. I received completed surveys from 32 students, and multiple students included more than one category in their response. The largest number of student responses (10) fell into the teacher explanation/taking notes category, and the smallest number of students either indicated fun/not boring as the most important factor in their learning or did not respond to the question (2 students in each category). The rest of the students were split fairly evenly among the visual (7), group work (6), acting/presentations (5), reading/study guides (5) categories. If we take the fun/not boring category to refer to what the teacher is doing (or not doing) in order to entertain the students, both the most frequent and least frequent categories are teacher-centered, depending on what the teacher is doing, while the (fairly evenly distributed) middle categories are more student-centered and focus on what the student is doing that facilitates learning.
Another way to categorize the responses is to divide them into teacher-centered or student-centered. This results in the following distribution: teacher-centered (12) and student-centered (23). Interestingly, though the teacher-centered category of teacher explanation/taking notes received the most responses of all the individual categories, nearly twice as many students responded that they learn best when instruction is somehow focused on their own actions rather than the teacher’s. This reinforces the idea that planning ought to account for and revolve around what students are doing during a given instructional period.
Throughout this inquiry, I have experimented with various ways of making lessons more student-centered. I have used the Harkness model for group discussions that students navigate without teacher interference. The senior literature circles and journals allowed students to focus on aspects of the dystopian novels they were reading that were of particular interest to them, rather than answer questions provided by me. Likewise, the silent conversations about Lord of the Flies allowed students to engineer their own collaborative meaning-making processes, but in a written, rather than verbal, format. I have used examples of student work -- the excerpts from personal narratives, for example -- in remediation and teaching new skills. Looking ahead, I will strive to make plans increasingly student-centered. Incorporating more democracy in terms of how texts are selected, something that various students requested, strikes me as a promising approach, as does using art and drama in ways that free students to make personal connections to the text.
Another way to categorize the responses is to divide them into teacher-centered or student-centered. This results in the following distribution: teacher-centered (12) and student-centered (23). Interestingly, though the teacher-centered category of teacher explanation/taking notes received the most responses of all the individual categories, nearly twice as many students responded that they learn best when instruction is somehow focused on their own actions rather than the teacher’s. This reinforces the idea that planning ought to account for and revolve around what students are doing during a given instructional period.
Throughout this inquiry, I have experimented with various ways of making lessons more student-centered. I have used the Harkness model for group discussions that students navigate without teacher interference. The senior literature circles and journals allowed students to focus on aspects of the dystopian novels they were reading that were of particular interest to them, rather than answer questions provided by me. Likewise, the silent conversations about Lord of the Flies allowed students to engineer their own collaborative meaning-making processes, but in a written, rather than verbal, format. I have used examples of student work -- the excerpts from personal narratives, for example -- in remediation and teaching new skills. Looking ahead, I will strive to make plans increasingly student-centered. Incorporating more democracy in terms of how texts are selected, something that various students requested, strikes me as a promising approach, as does using art and drama in ways that free students to make personal connections to the text.