What Teachers Can Learn From Students

In a recent study, a teacher took two days to replicate a student's life at school: she attended all the classes, played the sports and did the homework. Here's what she learnt:

• Students spend a lot of time sitting, and it's more energy-draining than you can imagine. Before the first day was over, the teacher had a lot of empathy for children who fidget in their desks.
• Students spend a lot of time having to listen. In many lessons, there's no opportunity to express your own views, you just have to assimilate those of the teacher. Even students who learn well by listening need a regular break to aid their concentration.
• In some classes, students may feel belittled if they ask a question.

The problem doesn't end at school though. Sometimes it continues on the sports field, with the coach doing all the talking and reprimanding, as well as at home where homework awaits.

Depending on the child's Learning Style, they will be better or worse equipped to handle what's expected of them. Discover their optimal Learning Style today and learn what makes them tick.

Open Days at School

An open day is when a school or kindy allows members of the public to go in and see what happens there. They are usually pretty formal, with speeches from the principal and the Board, and with chosen pupils showing the guests around the school.

It’s the school’s sales pitch and they’ll present themselves in the best light possible. Still, you can deduce the school's priorities from what is missing, or what they discuss at length, for example, an emphasis on iPads as a learning tool, or no mention of parental involvement.

Typically, parents choose a school or preschool based on a combination of three things:

·        analysing information contained in ERO reports and marketing materials;

·        word of mouth;

·        a gut response during a visit to the school.

You can search online and study the brochures, but they won’t convey the atmosphere of the school. Once you have a shortlist of schools you’re interested in, it makes sense to come in and get a feel for the place, see the students’ projects, talk to the families, ask questions.

Every parent will have their own list of priorities and questions. Here are starter-lists to get you rolling.

·        How do the students treat one another?

·        How does the school deal with bullying?

·        Are the students’ toilets fresh-smelling? Is there soap in the soap dispenser?

·        How good are the facilities and clubs your child may be interested in using (sport, art, library, woodwork workshop, kitchen)? Do they include beginners? Do they have B teams for sport?

·        Does the school celebrate personal achievement?

·        Ask the teachers why they chose to work at this school and whether they would send their own child there. Look for enthusiasm, a caring attitude and a real love of teaching.

Write down your feelings and observations as soon as possible - it’s easy to forget your first impressions when you have more than one school on your list.

Include your child - their instincts are as important as yours. No matter how great a school looks and what a fantastic reputation it has, if your child hates it, it’s not the right match.

School Without Classrooms

A new-idea school has just opened in Stockholm. No classrooms. No grades. No grouping children by age. On the surface, the concept sounds brilliant: innovative furniture to boost creativity, the opportunity to work on projects in groups or to do one-person research.

As far as learning styles are concerned, the school is catering for a lot of the learning style elements: the children can sit on comfortable sofas, they can work in social setups of their choice, there are bright lights and dimmer corners. Students who like independent work, informal structures and variety, are definitely benefiting from this environment.

But what about children who like routine and sitting at a desk and lots of teacher-guided learning? They're probably better off at a conventional school.

Would your child thrive in a school with no classrooms, like Vittra Telefonplan below? Find out.

PS Stockholm is a city of innovation. Have a look at this iPad act.

DO WE REALLY TEACH LITERATURE?

(a guest blog by Nicholas Reid, writer and critic)

A question has been jangling in my head recently and keeping me awake at night. Is the appreciation of literature really being taught?

I know at first glance the question seems self-evidently absurd. Of course the appreciation of literature can be taught. Otherwise why do we have all those English and other language departments and programmes in universities and colleges? And why do high-school teachers force Lord of the Flies, The God Boy, The Color Purple, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Whale Rider, The Old Man and the Sea, Man Alone, The Scarlet Letter into young and unwilling heads?

But think carefully about the question and you’ll see there is a real problem. If the appreciation of literature means responding perceptively to what authors have actually written, then is it really being taught?

Let me illuminate the problem by telling you what I know about a specific writer.

I’m quite knowledgeable about Elizabeth Gaskell and her novels. I know that she was not quite up there with classics like Dickens, George Eliot and Thackeray, but that she was an esteemed Victorian writer who has retained a considerable readership. I know that she is now much lauded by feminist academics because she gave a distinctly female account of early industrialised England. I know she wrote Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South, Wives and Daughters and other novels and short stories of small town, industrial town and domestic life; and I know that some of her work first appeared as serials in periodicals like Household Words and All the Year Round.

If you sat me down in front of a school exam question on Elizabeth Gaskell, or confronted me with an undergraduate essay topic on her, I’d be able to concoct a creditable answer. I could sagely discuss her themes – the circumscribed lives of women; the power of gossip; the clash of older village ways with industrialisation in England’s “railway age”; the beginnings of wage slavery; class divisions between the squirearchy and the middle classes; the ties that bind small communities together and so forth. I could name her main characters, write accounts of them, and neatly précis her plots. I could even make some apt comments on her style and her tendency to focus on the minutiae of life. All this would be off the top of my head from what I already know. Give me spend and hour or two to look some reference material, and I’d do even better.

But here’s the rub. Although it pains me to admit it, and although I should be performing ritualised penance, I have never read a single word of Elizabeth Gaskell’s works, even though three of her books sit on my shelves as I write this.

Having never got around to her, I have simply accumulated knowledge of her from other sources. These include passing references in general histories of literature; what I have heard other people say about her; enthusiastic recommendations from an Elizabeth Gaskell fan whom I knew some years back; and my having seen two BBC TV serial adaptations of her work – North and South and Cranford.

Everything I know about Elizabeth Gaskell is second-hand. My eyes have never travelled across the words she actually wrote and I’ve never experienced or assessed how she wrote.


Which brings me back to my original question – is the appreciation of literature really being taught?

After all, if the study of literature is supposed to be training our responses to the process of reading itself, to a particular writer’s style, and to the impact of the words on the page, then plot summaries, character studies, background sociological or biographical detail, what eminent critics have thought and the neat corralling of themes all have very little to do with it. Those things can be acquired without ever bothering to read whatever is supposedly being studied. They are a form of knowledge, but they are not an appreciation of literature.

I’m not exposing any obscure trade secret in noting this. The world is filled with high school students and perhaps a majority of BA students who have negotiated literature courses not by reading the set texts, but only by reading “study guides” on the model of the old Cole’s Notes or Monarch Notes, or by accessing whatever Wikipedia and the ‘net have to say. Conning lecturer’s notes always helps, too. (Our Humanities departments are so constituted that it is always wise to flatter your lecturer’s opinions when you formulate your answers.)

Regrettably, these methods will often be the very ones that earn an A+. Real literature for adults is allusive, can be read on many levels, and does not often lend itself to simple interpretations of the sort that one dashes off against the clock in exam or term-paper conditions. The student who has dutifully ploughed through, puzzled over and personally responded to something compendious like Bleak House may well be at a disadvantage in comparison with the student who has memorised by heart ready-made phrases about style, plot, character, themes, historical significance and so forth. I have often enough been on the other side of the fence as a (secondary- and tertiary-level) marker, and I know that a forthright, organised, clearly-expressed, information-packed answer will usually trump a sincere but more tortuous answer. Clarity and a genuine personal response to a text are not mutually-exclusive. Yet the organised, clearly-expressed answer is more likely to be the parroted answer.


I am reminded of a true story Solzhenitsyn once reported. An official Soviet-era manual advised students not to bother reading Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, but just to read the summaries of their novels given in the manual. The books themselves would be too “confusing”. Soviet officials may well have had ideological objections to undiluted Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with all their religious and non-materialist concerns. But the manual’s advice was a frank admission of the same process that is encouraged by our own pedagogy. I’m further reminded of how often, over the years, I have heard blowhards boasting that they won high grades in school and university courses just by memorising bits of a “study guide”. Usually this has been said to me as if it were a sign of the speaker’s extreme cleverness. In fact it merely references a game whose rules all teachers and academics fully understand.

There are some fairly obvious responses to what I am saying.

One would be to ask whether any of it matters. After all, if high school or tertiary students of literature are gaining credits in NCEA courses, or passing their examinations, then what does it matter how they acquired the relevant knowledge? This approach appeals to principals whose chief concern is making their schools look good in a competitive market (between schools, NCEA is just as competitive as older national examination systems were). It appeals equally to supervisors of tertiary academic programmes, whose funding relies on a successful through-put of as many students as possible. But it implicitly negates the whole reason for studying literature in the first place. It says that a real encounter with an author’s written words is less important than knowledge about those written words. Literature is reduced to useless data, encouraging many students to regard the whole concept with contempt and to avoid ever reading anything challenging again, once they have their degree or certificate.

Another response would be to point out that I am really talking about means of assessment rather the study of literature itself. What about those teachers who ask students to compile reading journals, or to compose personal and subjective responses to what they are set to read? What about those who devise tests and exercises that require recall of a text’s actual wording? What about seminars which challenge students’ understanding and discuss specific given passages of a text?


I concede that assessment of students is one of the main things that concerns me. I acknowledge, too, that the more advanced the level of study, the less easy it becomes to hide behind ready-made packages of other peoples’ summaries. Generally, high-school students and undergraduates can get away with it, but at the postgraduate level it is much harder. (Not that it is impossible, mind. And a little creative re-wording can usually circumvent the electronic guards that most universities now use to prevent outright plagiarism in students’ work.).


But I am still on firm ground when I note the prevalence of pretending to teach literature itself, while actually encouraging students to value facts and opinions about literature. Some years ago, as a conscientious high-school teacher, I used to read the “model” essays that were sent out to us as examples of the best students’ work in the old Bursary and Scholarship English exams. I became rapidly disillusioned as I noted how many of them could have been written without even opening the works that were supposedly being analysed. One such “model” essay, earning top marks, was a collection of well-ordered, clearly-expressed current clichés about the role of women in literature. It had only a peripheral relationship with the Virginia Woolf novel that it was ostensibly discussing. Doubtless the student who wrote it was a very intelligent 17-year-old (or Year 13) student. Doubtless, too, she had carefully memorised everything her teacher had told her. But she was not responding to literature. She was repeating something that had been squeezed out of literature before she got to it.

I could pile up the depressing anecdotes along these lines. I once met a high-school teacher at a training day who proudly circulated materials he gave his senior classes, telling them that “there are two ways to study a novel”. One was to read the novel. The other, which he recommended to his students as less laborious, was to watch a good film or television adaptation of the novel and then read a study guide. So much for encountering the words on the page. Then there was the lecturer who claimed that it was unimportant for him to read the works on which he lectured. All that mattered was that he knew the work’s cultural significance, its place in literary history and the chief critical arguments and controversies it had aroused. In effect, the lecturer gave second-hand opinions to his students who (unless they took the unusual expedient of doing their own reading) would eventually give him back third-hand answers.


And so on and so on.

In our senior national high-school Bursary and Scholarship English exams, there used to be a compulsory “unseen” question, in which students had to interpret a poem or piece of prose they were seeing for the first time. It was the one part of the paper that challenged them to demonstrate their own reading skills and perception, as opposed to regurgitating what they had been told. Of course it was eventually judged to be too hard for too many students, and ceased to be compulsory. So it was back to a paper which encouraged students to write what they had been told about literature, rather than what they had personally experienced of it. I am, however, encouraged that a similar “unseen” interpretation question is now part of NCEA exams.

As a teacher, one of my preferred forms of torture was to photocopy extracts from the novel my class was studying, and then make the students, under test conditions, identify where it came from, what it meant and what the passage displayed that was typical of the author’s style. Perhaps one day I will get around to reading Elizabeth Gaskell. I might then be able to answer such contextual quizzing about her. In the meantime, having not read single word of hers, I am fully equipped to pass whatever standard test a standard literature course on her could throw at me.

I know at least as much as an A+ student would.

(to read more of Nicholas Reid, have a look here)

Learning Styles and Teaching Science

Question: Can you hammer in a nail using a banana?

Answer: Sure you can. If the banana is frozen using liquid nitrogen.

Lesson planning:
Try to hammer a nail with a ripe banana. Make a lot of mess.
Drop another ripe banana into liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds.
Use cryo gloves and crucible tongs to remove the banana. Do not reach into the liquid nitrogen with your gloved hand.
Hold the banana in your gloved hand and hammer the nail successfully.
Do not let the children touch the frozen banana.

Explanation for students: A banana is made up of a lot of water, and water doesn’t make a very good hammer. When frozen, the water molecules slow down and hold tight to one another, creating ice.

Now, wasn’t that a lot more fun than an ordinary science lesson?

That’s what multi-sensory teaching is all about: having fun. Creative Learning and Prashnig Style Solutions advocate multi-sensory teaching as a means of getting students to pay attention, to behave in class and to learn the curriculum.

If you’re a teacher, make things easy for yourself. Depending on the child’s Learning Style, a bored student will most likely act up in class. They may play the fool or refuse to comply with instructions or simply stare out the window and daydream. They will certainly not learn much and they will not make your day.

Determining your students' Learning Style is the first step to a stress-free fun day.
With school science results falling dramatically in many countries, it’s time to resort to tricks such as hammering nails with bananas or soap suds explosion... even if the tricks border on magic. After all, isn’t all science magical? And aren’t magic tricks simply science that we don’t understand yet?

Learning Styles and Traditional Schools

Today’s typical classroom may look totally different to the one in which our parents learnt: it may have tables that are big enough for ten children (as opposed to desks for one or two), the seats may be arranged in a circle (as opposed to in rows), and the blackboard may be white.

Some things, however, don’t change. Today’s pupils are still required to rely heavily on their eyes in order to take in information. The information may come from a textbook, a movie, an overhead projector or a demonstration of a science experiment - all of which are highly visual sources.

Similarly, when it comes to checking the child’s knowledge, it is usually done in a visual way: written homework, homework that involves reading or drawing, written tests.

This is why it’s crucial to know your child’s learning style. If they are highly visual, especially if combined with auditory, you can rest easy knowing that the learning material is presented to them in an optimal way. Of course, you still need to make sure that they are motivated and that other elements of their learning style are accommodated (sound, temperature, structure, the level of detail, social needs, and so on)... and you still have to check their eyes regularly to make sure they are up to the learning task.

If your child is not visual, however, they will probably struggle in a traditional school. While of course respecting their unique learning preferences, it’ll be a good idea to teach them some techniques that allow them to cope with the very visual world around us.

Some of the techniques include:
· Encourage your child to look at objects in greater detail: ask them to describe what they see at a first glance and what they see when they look again for a longer period of time.
· Play “spot the difference” puzzles and “Where is Wally”?
· Practice reading paragraphs of text together, then visualising it as a movie.
· Ask them to close their eyes and tell you what colour clothes you’re wearing.
· Do jigsaw puzzles together, particularly those that rely on utilising observation skills.
· Make a game out of watching people in the street, in the café, in the mall.
· At the supermarket, look at the shelves together and count the varieties of cereal, dried fruit and cheese.
· Organise treasure hunts (in the garden or the family room) that rely on observation skills alone. Let the “treasures” stick out or bulge out just a little, and encourage the children to find them with their eyes, not hands.

You can find a free demo of learning style analysis here.

Learning Style - “Help, my child is impulsive!”

Does your child prefer to give a quick answer rather than a correct answer? Is her mind very quick? Does it constantly create new ideas?

If that’s the case, it’s possible that your child’s learning style is impulsive. She might have difficulties concentrating and staying focused on her schoolwork, she might get easily distracted from doing homework or paying attention to a task for a length of time.

For an impulsive child to thrive at school, she needs an understanding teacher who’s willing to accommodate her thinking style by allowing the child to answer in her preferred quick way and not discouraging her when she gets the answer wrong.

Fast-paced, short and challenging assignments suit an impulsive child’s thinking style best. A method that often works with impulsive children, is to ask them the question upfront and then tell them to find the answer in the textbook or in the classroom display cabinet (as opposed to telling them a lot of facts first and then asking questions about it). Asking one question at a time might also be a good way of keeping the child’s attention focused.

Another way may be to offer small rewards for every correct answer, thus motivating the child to become more flexible in their impulsive thinking style. Note: this will only work with externally motivated children (to find out more about your child’s motivation, please click here).

Either way, because impulsiveness is a biological trait, your child is not likely to change her thinking style very much as she grows older. To enhance her learning success in an environment that does not accept her impulsive style, she needs techniques for coping with being wrong some of the time, or with being labelled somebody who doesn’t think before they speak. You can help her by making her understand that this impulsiveness is simply part of her learning style, and not the person she is.

In any case, in today’s fast-paced society, it’s not always a bad thing to be impulsive. Sometimes a quick decision that’s not perfect may be better than a perfect decision that comes too late.

Did you know?
Impulsive decision-making is just one of 48 elements that make up your child’s learning style. To determine the other elements, analyse your child’s learning style here with our free demo.

Learning Styles: is your child too tired to learn?

Many children fail to achieve their potential at school because they run low on energy. Often, this is a direct result of mismatched learning styles, in other words, your child learns in a way that’s not accommodated at their school.

We all have an optimal way in which to absorb new and difficult concepts. If we are continually introduced to new ideas in a way that’s not the best for us, we will experience stress and fatigue. What’s more, when we are taught in a way that’s incompatible with our learning style, we will often fail to learn at all.

Many aspects constitute a person’s individual learning style: the time of day, the learning group, the way in which the information is presented (visually or orally), whether the teacher is using details or using the big picture, how bright the classroom light is, how warm the environment, how strict the structure - to mention just a few. Change but one of those elements into something that interferes with your child’s learning style, and the child will have to expand more energy in order to concentrate on his or her learning.

If you think your child’s learning style may be different to the traditional learning style expected at most places of learning, here is a scientifically researched way of finding out for sure: http://www.creativelearningcentre.com/products/learning-style-analysis/.

In addition to accommodating your child’s learning style, here are a few tips to help them replenish their energy levels:
· A nutritious low GI breakfast,
· Lunchbox packed with low GI snacks,
· Drinks plenty of water,
· Enough sleep at night,
· Keeping physically fit,
· Doing energising exercises (please contact us to find out more about them).