Is the idea of allowing your students to eat or doodle and draw while in class preposterous to you? Are you a parent who frowns at your son’s practice of studying in bed with loud music and dim lights?

Allow me to tell you this. You are not alone.

Every year, I receive thousands of such comments from educators, school administrators and parents who are at a loss on how to improve their students or children’s study habits. Every year, I tell them the same thing. Let them do what they want.

Often I am met with raised eyebrows and incredulous stares. Apparently, they turned to me for sound advice. But really, this is the best advice I have ever given.

You see, there are four kinds of perceptual strengths: auditory (hearing), visual (seeing) tactile (touching) and kinesthetic (doing).

This means that some students learn new information best when it is presented to them through their ears, their eyes, their hands, or through bodily movement.

NEW MINDSET

The key for teachers and parents is recognition: Knowing when a student is exhibiting a personal learning style, and supporting the student appropriately — without prejudicing the contrary learning styles of other students.

This is the new mind-set that the LS theory requires of teachers: To appreciate each student as a unique individual, instead of trying to force all students into one fixed, pre-set model.

For the past several years, the Center for Learning and Teaching Styles (CLTS) Philippines has been advocating for the implementation of the Learning Styles model in the Philippine classroom with much success.

Imagine, in a strict and stringent institution such as the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), learning styles had been proven to work.

Major Gismo Agulan, a former professor at the PMA could not believe the effects of LS at first. He said he never thought that a “perceived-to-be left-brain institution” would appreciate global approach in teaching methodologies as proven by their exposure to the learning styles theory.

Learning styles works best for all ages. For it is not only children who need to enjoy while learning.
Sr. Justine Rosales, DC, former president of the Bicol Higher Education Foundation believes that learning styles approach is also applicable to college students because it makes learning more fun and exciting.

Dr. Teena Fajatin, Directress of the Marie Ernestine School, observes the warm reception of graduate school students as far as learning styles is concerned. Since then, she has institutionalized the use of learning styles in her schools in Cebu.

Learning styles is all about using the best approach to induce learning. Dr. Lourdes Sabile, high school principal at the Central Colleges of the Philippines claims that she has started to apply the learning styles theory in their school as she observes that learning styles brings out the genius in each child.

Mrs. Aurora Catabona, president of the Science Club Advisers Association in the Phils. concurs. She is so excited that finally where science teachers practice learning styles approaches in their class, students begin to appreciate a “perceived to be difficult subject.”

Applying learning styles is not hard at all. The only reason why we perpetuate the so-called cycle of monotony in class is because teachers teach the way they were taught which is not exactly the best way to do it.

“The learning styles theory should therefore penetrate teacher training institutions,” to quote Dr Aida Macadaag, dean of the College of Education at the Mindanao State University in Marawi.

But parents should also be sensitive to the learning styles differences of their children.

And believe me, there had been positive changes.

Remember, the best way to help your children or your students learn is to let them be free. It is only through this freedom that they manifest their innate skills and abilities — every child is a genius.

(The author is the president of the Center for Learning and Teaching Styles, 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)