It's About Time: Why a Variety of Instructional Strategies is Essential to Learners

As a child I was an avid fan of Little House on the Prairie and was enthralled by the school scenes. The idea of carrying lunch to school in a pail, of sitting on a bench at the front of the class with no desk to hide behind, and of standing up to recite memorized passages all seemed so catastrophically embarrassing to me. I was a painfully shy student who was grateful for the 70s and 80s teaching strategies that allowed me to quietly do my own work and never interact with other students. I rarely interacted with teachers either, even when inequitable access to technology negatively affected my social studies grade in sixth grade: my family did not buy newspapers, so I was unable to cut out weekly current events and write summaries of them.

Instructional strategies have flourished since my days in American public schools, and I believe our students are the beneficiaries. I might have blossomed with an elementary teacher who used a bit of behaviorist theory and gave me positive reinforcement for being a good student; instead I learned that being good was expected and did not make me particularly special. I wonder how my life would be different if my middle school teachers had used cooperative learning techniques and forced me out of my shell, as shown in this video.

Perhaps if a high school teacher had implemented some constructivist theories and allowed me to pursue my own interests or create my own meaning, I would not have skipped so much of my senior year that one more absence would have meant graduating a year later. 

This little guy with the abacus accurately represents the difference between my school experience (top) and that of my children (bottom). Students in the 21^st century know themselves as learners, and teachers implement various instructional methods to address their needs. This is so much better than the one-size-fits-all model I saw on TV and experienced to a lesser degree.

As a first grade teacher, I helped my student discover their preferred learning styles using the site http://www.bgfl.org/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks1/ict/multiple_int/what.cfm. This bit of technology helped me develop lessons to meet the needs of all learners in my classroom. Thanks to the abundance of technology available in my school, I can direct visual learners to videos, tutorials, and mind-mapping programs while kinesthetic learners can practice skills with educational games and simulations. Musical learners can listen to music while working on tasks and can use rhymes and songs to learn facts. Technology is an essential tool for implementing the various instructional strategies to our diverse population of learners. 

Photo credit: http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/old-and-new-math