Assessing How I Learn

What tools can you teach your students to use to assess the ways in which they learn, and how can these tools help them succeed in school?

Let's start with the premise that every child is born with an innate desire to learn. Now, consider the possibility that given the right environment and the right stimuli every child possesses at least one kind of intelligence in which they can excel.

Unfortunately, our schools are not traditionally designed to celebrate these ideas. We spend a lot more time focusing on what our students don't know how to do than on learning about where their true strengths lie.

If you really think about it, most of the assessment we do in the classroom is designed to help us figure out what our students don't know about a particular subject, topic, concept, etc. We learn a lot about their deficiencies, but their assets often remain hidden unless you happen to be teaching a subject in which they naturally excel. What if things were different?

What would happen if you knew what each of your students needed to excel?
If you knew each of your students' Learning Styles (their strongest and their weakest) you could group them and differentiate assignments accordingly. If you knew where each of your students fell on the spectrum of Multiple Intelligences you could provide them with projects that play to the ways in which they are smart and allow them to demonstrate their knowledge of certain topics in a mode that comes most naturally.

Consider some of these assessment tools and resources:
Learning Styles Online Questionnaire (gives you a quick print-out with your results and includes good descriptions of each of 8 learning styles and the things learners can do to excel in their particular areas of strength)
Learning Style Inventory (online but also can be printed as a hand-out)
Learning Styles Inventory (print from the online version, can easily be filled out by elementary and middle school students)
Learning Styles and Teaching (thorough descriptions of what a teacher can do to cater instruction to specific learning modalities)
Find My Strengths (an online Mulitiple Intelligences assessment)

What would happen if your students knew the learning style modifications they'd have to make to best understand each concept you teach?
Teaching students about learning styles is definitely not in the standard curriculum, but the more students learn about the way their brains work, how they process and receive information, etc., the better equipped they will be to take control of their own learning now and in the future. You can help them build this essential skill by making the process of assessing for Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences transparent. Involve students in reviewing the data gathered from these tests and help them develop study and note-taking strategies that utilize their strengths and help to improve their weaknesses.

Consider some of these activities and resources:
Multiple Intelligences Activity Chart (lists activities ideal for each of the 8 intelligences)
Multiple Intelligences - How to Teach Anything 8 Ways (resources and information)
Student Learning Strengths Inventory (an excellent lesson plan built around teaching students about their learning style)

Loving the Subject

When you have to teach the topics you once feared... you learn to have a new appreciation for your students' perspectives.

I loved being a 5th grade student. We turned the classroom into a rainforest. We wrote our own newspaper. Nearly every homework assignment involved application of creative imagination. In retrospect I realize we studied the things Ms. Rainey loved, and I was lucky they were also the things I loved.

But I don't remember Ms. Rainey ever teaching us any math and the year I spent on vacation from the subject set me back and furthered a math phobia I've had ever since.

Since working at Inspired Teaching I've gotten over the math phobia a little, mostly because I don't have a choice. We incorporate math into just about every workshop we do and the result of this constant bombardment is that I've grown more confident in my skills.

As an English teacher, grammar was the topic I most feared teaching. The first year I taught, much like Ms. Rainey, I avoided it entirely. I now know that was to the detriment of my students who struggled with writing and reading and would have benefited from the exposure to the rules and regulations of language.

It wasn't until I went to grad school and took a class in grammar that I realized just how weak my own skills were. I studied hard and took time to play with each of the rules I learned and try them out in different contexts so I understood where they came from and why they existed. I was not taught grammar in this manner. I had to teach myself in the way I knew I needed to learn. After that class I taught the topic much differently, and without fear.

Thanks to my own struggles to learn the content I now understood why, when dished out as a set of seemingly arbitrary rules, English grammar seemed boring, rigid, and confining. I felt what it was like to be a student on the other side of that intimidating book with all its red lines and tiny font. And I knew that wasn't the experience I wanted to recreate for my students.

So, instead, I assigned teams of students to different grammar rules and worked with them to create lessons they could teach the rest of the class. We practiced with examples. We used our own language to describe the rules. We learned a lot together.

You go into teaching and face a classroom full of students who expect you to be the expert in your field, and most of the time you probably bear some love for the subject(s) you teach. But it's okay to recognize that you don't know everything - and to accept that you might even be a little afraid of some of those things you don't know much about at all.

The act of becoming a teacher doesn't stop the process of being a student and opening ourselves up to learning and teaching simultaneously might just put us in better touch with the students we see each day.