Teaching and Learning Styles

You've probably heard before that everyone learns differently. Some of us are visual learners, some are auditory, some are kinesthetic, and so on. But it turns out there are a couple of different theories when it comes to defining exactly what kinds of different learning styles exist and how they manifest themselves.

The Index of Learning Styles, developed by Richard Felder and Barbara Solomon at North Carolina State University, gives a little more detailed insight into different learning styles and the implications they might have on our teaching practices.

• I am somewhere between active and reflective, meaning I prefer to learn by doing (also the motto of Cal Poly, my alma mater) and I encourage my students to do the same, but I also prefer to work alone instead of in groups. I have a hard time relying on others to hold up their end of a group project, and I sympathize with students who feel the same, but they have to overcome this in an ensemble setting. I encourage students to focus on doing their own job well because it helps everyone else feel comfortable doing the same.
• I am an intuitive learner, which means I enjoy learning concepts and ideas more than facts and data. Music students tend to be a mix of intuitive and sensing learners, with some students approaching music from a creative, innovative perspective and others approaching it from an academic, analytical angle. The former type of students often excel in performance activities, especially improv, and the latter type are usually great with music theory and analysis. The irony is that I generally prefer to study music theory rather than improvisation, and I was more successful as an academic than as a performer when I was in college.
• I'm in the center of the spectrum when it comes to being a visual vs. verbal learner. I apply this often in my classes by asking my students to look at a particular spot in the music as I describe or demonstrate what adjustments I would like them to make. Both of these learning styles also come into play in the process of learning new music, as some students prefer to learn by reading the notes and rhythms and others prefer to learn by ear.
• I'm also pretty middle of the road between sequential and global learning. I appreciate logical steps when solving a problem, and I teach my AP Music Theory students certain sequences when they are learning skills like realizing a figured bass or Roman numeral progression. But I also prefer to see the big picture from the beginning, and sometimes I "just get it" and have a hard time explaining the concept because it seems so simple to me. This can be challenging sometimes when I'm introducing basic music theory concepts to my beginning choir students.

Anthony F. Grasha and Sheryl Riechmann at the University of Cincinnati created a different approach to identifying teaching styles. Based on a survey where the responder answers with numbers 1 to 5 (1 for "strongly disagree," 5 for "strongly agree," and 2-4 in between), they assign varying degrees of the roles a teacher takes on in the classroom.

As a disclaimer, I will say that I think my results are all "high" because my courses are so different from the typical high school class experience.

• Like all teachers, I have to be an expert in my particular content area in order for students to accept my feedback and suggestions for improvement.
• I must be authoritative in order to be an effective classroom manager, especially in classes where I am actively encouraging students to make noise (!).
• I try to be the best possible model for my students, both in terms of musical concepts (how exactly do I want them to sound?) and in terms of personality and relationships (what do I want them to be like as humans?).
• My students do regular listening journal assignments, where we listen to or watch a performance and discuss and critique it as a class. I give them prompts each time so they have some sort of guide for what to focus on while we listen.
• At some point I have to release the responsibility for learning onto them, so I give them opportunities like sectionals, where they work together in small groups to improve and fix problems without me directly telling them what to fix.

Like the Myers-Briggs personality test, I fall roughly in the middle of all of these different teaching and learning style indexes. Though this seems very "vanilla" at first, I actually think that this helps me connect with students of various learning styles and personality types because I can empathize with different aspects of their experiences. Ultimately, it's that ability to connect that I think makes me a successful teacher.