One of the HUGE benefits of homeschooling is that you can tailor your homeschooling plan to each individual student's best way to learn. Unlike a classroom where there are many children whose different learning styles need to be met (and therefore, by definition, learning has to be less efficient for at least some of those kids), by really understanding your child's style, you can find an approach that works best for him (I use “him” and “he” only because my household has many more “him/he” people in it than “her/she” type people!).
The other considerations are:
- If learning is less challenging for your child, and if they understand better how they learn, the homeschooling process is less frustrating for both the parent and the student.
- If you understand your child’s strengths, you can find material that best suits those strengths. However you can also focus better on strengthening his weaknesses if you deliberately choose topics/subjects that are easier for him and use that learning style in small doses.
- It makes group learning less challenging for the student if he knows his primary learning style and knows if the group complements his/her learning style or not. My son (visual/kinesthetic/auditory) was very intimidated in a group learning situation where there were many strong auditory learners because he felt he couldn’t keep up verbally until we talked about his strengths and how his strengths were very obvious in other situations.
- Part of developing an effective homeschooling approach is that you have to understand your learning style as well so you know what your bias is in evaluating curriculum and approaches -- and to understand how that fits with your child's primary learning style. It’s easy to be drawn to curriculum that would work for you!
Types of Learning Styles
There are many ways to look at learning styles. Some of the better-known approaches include:
- Visual, Kinesthetic, Auditory (probably the most common learning styles model – with various ways to measure it and several ways to interpret it)
- For a description and free online questionnaire, go to: http://www.businessballs.com/vaklearningstylestest.htm
- A similar breakout, but focusing on 4 pairs of learning styles like visual/verbal and visual/non-verbal with specific learning techniques that students can use is at: http://www.metamath.com/lsweb/fourls.htm
- Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
- For a description and a free questionnaire including graphical results go to: http://www.learning-styles-online.com/overview/
- And another easy to follow questionnaire with ways to put it in practice: http://literacyworks.org/mi/intro/index.html
- Gregorc model (Concrete/Abstract/Sequential/Random), similar to the Kolb learning styles
- A good description of each of the 4 styles, what they do best, what makes sense for them, what’s hard for them, and what questions they ask when learning: http://www.csrnet.org/csrnet/articles/student-learning-styles.html
- Another learning style developed at NCSU (Felder and Silverman) uses the following styles: active/reflective, sensing/intuitive, visual/verbal, and sequential/global
- For a description, a free questionnaire, and how to use the information in learning, go to: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Learning_Styles.html
Since I’m an Abstract/Sequential learner who is very much an information gatherer -- and primarily Visual, I like to have lots of different ways of looking at learning styles! The following books are my favorite recommendations:
Cynthia Tobias: The Way They Learn
I think this is one of the best books to start with. She takes the basic Gregorc model and looks at several different approaches to learning. She also talks about the challenges of having a parent approach learning one way and the child having a different learning style.
Cynthia Tobias also has a website that offers video training on many of these topics: http://www.applest.com/
Dawna Markov: How Your Child is Smart
This is the only book I've found that looks at learning styles and the importance/interaction of whether the style is primary, secondary or tertiary. It explains how important the tertiary level is.
Many parents automatically know this as the tertiary style is the style used to get your child’s attention most effectively. Do you automatically put your hand on your son’s shoulder when he’s out of control? (Tertiary: Kinesthetic). Do you most effectively get his attention by raising your voice or speaking directly to him? (Tertiary: Auditory).
Willis and Hodson: Discover Your Child's Learning Style: Children Learn in Unique Ways - Here's the Key to Every Child's Learning Success
This is a good overview of several different ways of looking at learning styles, personal interests, etc.
Bottom line:
Learning styles is only one way of looking at the different approaches people use to learn and to interact with each other. Other ways to understand how people learn and interact with each other are personality styles and right brain/left brain learning. I’ll do posts on those over the next few days (hopefully!).
