An Excerpt From Barbara Prashnig's Keynote Address in Poland

11 Steps to implementing Learning Styles on a school-wide basis:

1. Teacher training (LS Day 1) “Diversity in the Classroom Based on Learning Styles” including teachers’ own personal LSA-Adult profiles

2. Student assessments with LSA questionnaires, printing of computer-generated student profiles by the school itself

3. Teacher Training (LS Day 2) “Help for Problem Students – new Classroom Management – Group Profiles” interpreting student profiles with focus on underachievers; LSA Interpretation Manual; classroom re-arrangement

4.    Observation period of seven days carried out by teachers trained in learning styles

5. Sharing results with students and parents: interpretation of LSA profiles, homework and study strategies for students; parent evenings to share results

6. Teacher training (LS Day 3) “Teaching Styles, Learning Tools, implementing LSA” including teachers’ personal TSA-Ed profiles; focussing on mismatch between learning & teaching styles; production of learning tools; implementation strategies

7. Creating and using interactive learning tools, produced initially by teachers, later by students, resource teachers and/or parents

8.    Adaptation of classroom teaching to suit analytic and holistic students – lesson preparation to integrate LS into learning cycles and accommodate L/R brain processing, plus strategies for multi-sensory teaching to cater for auditory, visual, tactile & kinesthetic learning needs

9.    Classroom redesign: based on students’ preferences from group profiles and with students’ input; school-wide co-operation is necessary to achieve the desired outcomes

10. Evaluation phase: monitor students’ progress and evaluate impact of programme on teachers, students, parents and the community at large

11. Continuation: incorporate new students, train new teachers and continue

     to build the ‘School of the Future Based on Learning Styles’.

 Please contact us for more information.

Learning Styles Rock Poland

Earlier this week, Barbara Prashnig caused an outbreak of public excitement when she addressed the audience of the First Neuro-didactics Conference in Poland. Learning Styles, it seems, is exactly what the Polish education system needs in order to overcome forty years of communism followed by three decades of not knowing how to apply the political freedom to bring about a learning revolution.

The attendees of the conference hope to shape the necessary changes in education systems around the world and find answers to the following questions:

·        Do today's schools facilitate or hinder brain function?     

·        Why do students lose their motivation to learn?     

·        Does it make sense to focus learning on testing outcomes?     

·        Is student potential realised in school?     

·        Does school help students develop a positive self-image and build self-confidence?

Creative Learning and Learning Styles will be behind them all the way.

 

Secrets of successful teaching: flexibility and matching styles

(excerpt from "The Power of Diversity" by Barbara Prashnig)

1. Matching students’ learning styles with the appropriate teaching styles will always lead to successful interaction between teachers and their students, and result in improved learning outcomes as we have seen in this chapter.

2. High flexibility for achieving genuine style matches is maybe more important, and teachers need to be confident in choosing their methods and strategies, and must be prepared to try something else when the usual methods don’t work. This ‘something else’ should not be trial and error, but based on a sound knowledge of students’ learning style needs. But isn’t that what teachers are supposed to do anyway, you might ask. Supposed maybe, but very few teachers are actually flexible enough to change their methods according to their students’ learning needs because most teachers have a very limited repertoire of teaching methods - remember, they have all been trained by the same analytical system - and when the few well-known strategies don’t work, they are soon at their wits’ end, blaming everyone and everything else for their students’ failure and finally give up on them.

Another reason for this unfortunate situation is the fact (again based on research findings and our own

experiences in data collection) that teachers are among the least flexible people of all professional groups. The majority have very strong preferences based on analytic, left-brain dominance, paired with very strong beliefs about what’s right and wrong in learning. They find it very hard to flex and adjust, prefer to stay with what they know, even when this knowledge is outdated, and generally resist change.

(...) It is quite obvious that educators need to become more flexible, and teachers who are now working

with learning styles realise that it is they who have to be the most flexible person in class. Highly flexible people usually get on well with others and you probably remember one or the other teacher who was well-liked by everyone, who always found a way to get on with others and were a great inspiration for the young ones.

(Purchase link: "The Power of Diversity" by Barbara Prashnig)

A Question of Learning Styles: What has gone wrong in education?

Let’s consider formal education and ask a few formal education questions:

• How many thousands of hours do students sit in classrooms experiencing lectures or lectures, deadly boring activities which bore them to death, which stifle activities their curiosity, and their spontaneously emerging interest?
• What happens when a child experiences uncertainty about details of the presentation?
• How many hundreds of hours do they spend reading books?
• And again, what can students do when they encounter something they do not understand or evokes their curiosity? Will they raise their hands and ask?

Only those who are not easily intimidated. The majority of students, however, learn to ignore all but their most powerful urges. Slowly but surely their experiences at school result in a deadening of school experiences kill their inner sensitivity.

Unlike the way children learn informally before and outside school, the entire educational system discourages them from ‘tuning’ into their own inner learning processes. They become conditioned to disregard their own meaning, their learning needs, disregard their (learning) style and individuality in favour of acquiring machine-like behaviours and uniform outcomes uniform outcomes favoured by the system and those who represent it.

Consider the following: before children go into children learn by formal education, they learn miraculously by developing an inner sensitivity for their learning processes which is their day-to-day experience for years. When they go to school, in the process at school of being taught various subjects, the message they receive now is: what goes on inside your head is meaningless, pay attention and do as we tell you!

This whole dilemma has nothing to do with teachers’ intentions; this is not the issue. The problem is not WHAT is being taught but HOW it is done. The formal environment and traditional teaching methods continually discourage children from remaining sensitive to their own most essential capacities for learning. It’s the overall education experience education experience which turns, almost as a rule, highly energised, turns curious, eager and alive children into mainly tired, alive children into uninterested, uneasy, bored and frustrated students.

This is true for schools in every country I have visited so far, from Finland to Hong Kong, from New Zealand to Sweden, from the US to Denmark. And what’s even more alarming, this unfortunate development can be seen everywhere - despite the school, the teacher, even the socioeconomic family status of the student.

(excerpt from The Power of Diversity by Barbara Prashnig)

Wondering how to put it right? Start here.

Learning Styles - How Your Child Learns Best

Learning Styles allow you to find out how your child learns best. When it comes to learning about Christopher Columbus, for example, she may find it easiest and most enjoyable to:
· Read a factual book on the subject.
· Read a novel on the subject, with a lot of the contents fictionalised.
· See the movie “1492”.
· Visit a museum exhibition about sea voyages.
· Make a model of the ship.
· Direct, write or star in a play about Columbus.

And that’s not all. When and where and with whom are also important choices when it comes to absorbing new information. Your child might like working alone or with friends, in the morning or the evening, in a quiet or busy spot.

To find out more, please visit Creative Learning and Prashnig Style Solutions and take the tour.

Did you know that...
.... your child's learning style affects more than just her grades?

· It also determines how she plays sport, forms friendships and communicates her emotions.
· It influences what she does for fun in her spare time and how safe she is on the Internet.
· It is a good indicator of whether - as a teenager - she will find it easy to say no to cigarettes, drugs and other dangerous activities.