It has been said before in many different ways, but it all boils down to the same thing and applies equally well to learning: “Different strokes for different folks.” “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” “What’s food for one may be poison for another.”

The point is that persons are a highly diverse lot. The point is that each person is unique. This uniqueness
finds expression in every situation, including the classroom. Uniform, unvarying teaching styles are not only boring to the max; they are also ineffective.

Consider the classroom as a steak restaurant, the teacher a cook, the subject matter as beef, and the students as the diners. Old teaching paradigms would have the teacher-cook say, “This is the kind of steak I choose to serve you guys, and this is the way you are all going to have to take it.” This approach is sometimes called “ramming it down their throat.”

A new teaching paradigm says it’s a diner’s world there inside the classroom: it is the diner’s tastes that must be met. You want your students to take their steak, better serve it up the way they want it.

Sure, it will mean a bit more work for the teacher. But once you see your diners lapping it up and asking for more, you’ll know that it was worth it.

This new teaching paradigm goes by the name of learning styles (LS). There are about a dozen LS available in the market today. I personally prefer the Dunn and Dunn Learning Styles model.

Over the past 22 years, this model has been field-tested and fine-tuned through research in more than 60 institutions of higher learning in the United States and other countries.

According to the model, there are at least 22 items in the learning preference menu, and these are grouped under five major categories: environmental, physiological, social, emotional, and psychological. It defines learning style as the sum of an individual learner’s preferences in all those categories.

Hey, 22 years of research; 22 items; five categories; 60 educational institutions – that’s a whole lot of cooking! Makes you wonder how we managed to learn anything at all under the old paradigms.
So throw out the old pots and pans, bring in learning styles and cook up a storm inside your classroom.

(Henry S. Tenedero is the president of the Center for Learning and Teaching Styles and MINDful IDEAS, an affiliate of the International Learning Styles Network, based at St. John’s University in New York. He is a graduate of the AIM Masters in Development management and of the Harvard Graduate School for Professional Educators. He can be reached at htenedero@yahoo.com.)