There are lots of different educational routes other than traditional mainstream schooling. You might be looking into a Montessori setting, home-schooling, unschooling, distance education or even something else. No matter what option you choose, it is always beneficial to think about the type of learner you are working with.
Years ago, Howard Gardener developed the Theory of Multiple Intelligences believing that we all have different strengths in certain areas. These strengths are visual-spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, musical, linguistic, logical-mathematical, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalistic, which explains how people express their knowledge and skills in different ways.
Knowing how your child learns best can help you to develop or choose a curriculum that suits them individually, collect appropriate resources, approach the content and skills being taught, support them in displaying what they have learnt and even helping you to decide where and how to set up your learning environment. For example, some learners needs visual models to look at while they listen to an explanation and prefer to display their understand in some sort of visual means. Others need to be moving materials around to help consolidate their understanding and prefer to show their knowledge in a creative means.
Some students can also be impacted by the way that their environment is constructed. For example, some learners thrive when listening to music, or are able to work independently and others learn best when bouncing their ideas around in a group. Just having a conscious mind to who your learner is and what positively impacts their way of receiving and displaying their knowledge can make a huge difference to their engagement and education.
Another thing to think about when deciding how you will approach your new form of education is to think about whether you want to be the traditional teacher or opt for a more student centered approach. We all know that a traditional teacher takes the content to be taught and delivers it to students, but a student centered approach allows the child to have a more connected role in the learning process. Here students are more independent and teachers help to facilitate the learning. The students have more control over what they learn and how they learn it, the content is open to travelling down multiple roads and students can explore this in any means necessary. Think of it as a student driven inquiry. Simply being told the answer never helps us to truly learn the hows and whys of something. But being allowed to explore with a person to guide the experience ensures the content is meaningful and purposeful to the individual investigating it.
As a teacher or facilitator, it is important to think about how you will guide, explain and answer questions that your child has. Children often have some knowledge about the topic being explored but need to know more. Telling children where to look for information or giving them a direct answer doesn’t help them problem solve or think critically about a topic. As a facilitator to the learning, try to ask children questions like:
- What do you know already?
- Can you tell me more?
- What else can you share?
- How did you work that out?
- Can you explain your thinking?
- How else could you do this?
This allows the learner to tap into ways to solve their own problems and find their own information. Asking children to state what they know can be a means of promoting their own thinking and forcing them to think for themselves. Often, they know more than they think they do, they just don’t realise it. If students can explain, in any means that works for them, what they know and how they know it, it shows that they’re developing or have developed a true understanding of the content being taught as they’ve consolidated their own understanding. Questioning guides learners down a path where they can apply this process to future situations and ensures that you act as the facilitator to the learning and they are the driver.
Take a deeper dive here and explore the different kinds of teaching and learning styles to help get you started on your journey.
An Educator’s Guide to Teaching Styles & Learning Styles (sandiego.edu)
