Mr. Ebeling suggests ways to increase the likelihood that more of your students will learn. LEARNING styles! You hear of them and read about them. Learning styles! You study them and analyze them. Learning styles! You think about them and maybe even do some lesson planning with them in mind. You observe that each student in your class is unique. You wonder how much your students might learn if you could truly individualize your instruction according to each student's unique style. You might prefer Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, Bernice McCarthy's 4-Mat system, the Myers-Briggs personality type indicators, or the colloquial bea-ver-lion-otter-golden retriever analogy of Gary Smalley and John Trent. Each of these systems provides a way to categorize individuals into types so that we can better help them learn in the classroom setting. There is value in knowing what type of learner each student happens to be - and what type of learner you as a teacher happen to be. There is evidence that most of us tend to teach the way we learn. Our own style often becomes our most comfortable teaching style. So knowing your own style can help you better teach those of differing styles. Teach the Whole Class First Classrooms in preschools, elementary schools, and high schools are not designed for one-on-one instruction. You are assigned a group of students. The class may be self-contained, or it may change every half day or every time a bell rings. You teach the whole class. Within that class are the unique individual learners. There is comfort in knowing that they can be clustered into three, four, seven, or eight different groups, depending on whose learning scheme you are embracing. So you teach the whole class. You subdivide the students into smaller groups for some tasks. You use cooperative to generate more involvement. You try a wide range of teaching techniques, hoping that everybody learns, that everybody gets But the reality is that there is usually somebody who doesn't learn what the rest of the class does. You plan your lesson with the intent that everyone will learn, but somebody doesn't get it. You teach with great skill, but somebody doesn't get it. You review and repeat, but somebody doesn't get it. With all the diversity of students in your class, it should be expected that somebody won't get it. There are factors other than styles with which you are contending. Your class has children from the most supportive homes and children from borderline neglectful homes. Somebody won't get it. Your class has children who have massive amounts of intellectual energy and children who have almost no energy to try to learn anything. Somebody won't get it. Your class has children whose personal lives are stable and children for whom it's a miracle that they even get to school. Somebody won't get it. Just look at your class. The range of learners is extensive. It is normal that somebody won't get it. The main question is, Will you do anything more about it? Two Choices If you have students who don't get it, you have two choices: 1) you can teach again tomorrow the same way you did today and hope that the learner who hasn't been will, for the first time, get it; or 2) you can adapt your teaching so that you increase the likelihood that more students will learn more. If you choose the first option, you need read no further. You are satisfied that there is nothing else you can do to increase the likelihood that more can take place. If, however, you choose the second option, you need to consider the different ways you can adapt what you are doing. The following four steps will aid you in the process. Step 1. Plan your lesson for the whole class. Adapting implies that there is a plan to begin with, something to change, something to alter. …