Learning Styles

Students always discuss teachers and describe their favourite ones as the teachers that encouraged their learning the best, teachers that were helpful and teachers that were fun.  Perhaps, it is not so much the teachers themselves that make them great as it is their teaching style and the match to the learning style of their students.  Boaler (2002) states that “different pedagogies are not just vehicles for more or less knowledge, they shape the nature of the knowledge produced...” (p. 132).  In other words students may be able to learn more and grasp a deeper understanding if the teaching style is effective. 

 

The Amber Hill students were very clear in their displeasure of the way they were being taught, especially the girls.  They enjoyed classes that were more collaborative, open and non-competitive.  When faced with everyday mathematics problems the Amber Hill students would “abandon the mathematics they had learned in school and were forces to rely on their own invented methods. (Boaler, 2002, p. 130).  Whereas, the Phoenix Park students found that their “project-based work was useful in new and different situations” (p. 125).  

Burton (1999) discusses research and classroom teaching with a number of mathematicians and finds that the competitive style is very predominant in most mathematics classrooms and that researchers have spoken of the difficulties in “persuading teachers that a collaborative style is appropriate in classrooms” (p. 132).  In Burton’s research, she found there to be differences in learning styles of lecturers.  A female lecturer stated that, “most of the work that I do is collaborative” while a male lecturer claims that “mathematicians as a whole don’t seem to work together” he also claimed to prefer to work alone and that he doesn’t like working with others (Burton, 1999, p. 129).  This is also mirrored by Boaler’s discoveries of the top set students from Amber Hill.  The females preferred to work collaboratively with other students because it gave them “access to a depth of understanding that textbook work denied them” (Boaler, 2002, p. 142).  However, the boys “disliked working in groups because they felt that it slowed them down” (Boaler, 2002, p. 143).

References:

Boaler, J.  (2002). Experiencing School Mathematics.  New York: Routledge.

Burton, L. (1999). The practices of mathematicians: What do they tell us about coming to know      mathematics? Educational Studies in Mathematics, 37, 121–143.