One of the main goals of my GAME plan is to get to know my students and their learning styles on an individual basis. Last week I developed the surveys I will use at the beginning of the year to help me towards this. This survey and my analysis of it are the key components in reaching this goal, so now that I have the survey ready, I can concentrate on what I will do with the information once I have it.
Thinking about this brought new questions to mind. Some students may have more than one learning style, if so, how should I group them? I know I probably will not be able to create every lesson to match every student's unique learning style. Should I put them into more broad groups, so I can develop some lessons that meet 2 or 3 broader style groups, while still having other lessons that address each individual learning style?
I have also progressed towards meeting my goal of creating learner-centered lessons, where the students pick a topic to do a more in depth study of. I have chosen a few units that I think would be good to start with, including the human body and ecology. I chose these to begin with because they are both large units and have a lot of sub-topics that the students could chose from for their study.
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Alison I think I would put the students into more than one group. One technique for groups is giving students four different partners that they can be paired up with at any given time. They are called clock partners so each students would have a 3:00 partner, a 6:00 partner and so on. This could be modified to meet your needs. For example 3:00 groups, 6:00 groups etc.
ReplyDeleteKatherine
Alison,
ReplyDeleteI have thought of using a survey for students as well, but have struggled with generating the questions to ask students. Would you mind sharing some of your questions or your survey? Maybe I could modify a few to use with fourth graders. I also agree that working in groups would be fine. Helping students learn more about their learning style will help them in the future. You could directly tell them the reason for your survey and that throughout the year they will be working with classmates who share their learning style.
Good Luck,
Courtney
When it comes to grouping based on student interests, my fear is we stifle their ability to be open to new ideas. For example, if I always provide musical opportunities to certain student but not to those who are perhaps kinesthetic learners, am I doing them a disservice?
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