Working at a community college is a great place to learn about teaching. Much more so than at the four-year places I’ve studied and worked, my community colege puts a lot of resources, formally and informally, into helping its faculty members develop as educators.
One thing that gets mentioned within the first five minutes of many discussions of teaching is that students vary in learning style. Some students learn best parsing sentences out of lectures and textbooks, while others learn best building physical models and molding objects our of clay. My own blogroll includes a link to a quiz where you can work out what your own style is.
I myself don’t keep up with the education literature, so I was surprised to learn that the usefulness of learning styles inspires some disagreement. People don’t seem to dispute that students have different preferences in how their information comes to them. Some students really do absorb visual diagrams better than others. But students’ preferences don’t always translate into differences in which delivery methods work best for them. It may be that some material is best delivered in particular ways, regardless of students’ learning preferences. That makes sense. Just because a particular student is a strongly verbal learner doesn’t mean that she should learn molecular structure only from textbooks and shouldn’t bother buying one of those stick-and-ball molecular-model kits.
None of this lets professors off any hooks, however, and we should still be trying to present our material in a variety of ways. If only to encourage breadth of thinking, we should be presenting population genetics both as equations on the blackboard and as moving dots in computer simulations.
