Thursday, June 21, 2007

More learning styles












The four characters in the sit-com Seinfeld represent aspects of the four basic learning styles.

Kramer - the intuitive and creative thinker.
Jerry - the logical thinker.
Elaine - the caring emotional individual.
George - the procedural and practical.

The four styles: the head - the thinker; the hand - the practical; the mind's eye - the imaginative; and the heart - the caring person

Of course no one is a pure style and, if they were, they would be interesting people indeed! Dr Spock, in Star trek, represents the pure unemotional logical style - he would make an interesting School Review Officer! We are all our own special mix but we do have preferences, as do all our students.

Just imagine a school run by any one of the Seinfeld cast.

Kramer's school would be different - full of 'off the wall' ideas. George's would be boring ( or is that my bias?) and Elaine's all a bit emotional. Possibly Jerry would be the best bet but he would aways be worrying about it was going all the time. Perhaps he would make a better ERO officer than Dr Spock! Personally I would like ERO full of Kramer's to compensate for the present lot!

It is pretty obvious that the style of a leader influences the direction of the school ( for better or worse) and the best situation would to have input from a diverse team to ensure all points of view were represented.

In a class the teachers style can equally be the limiting factor - it is important for teachers to plan activities with the four basic styles in mind.

This was the point of my previous blog.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kramer for principal!

Anonymous said...

More Kramers for principals - more fun for all . Schools are so serious about failing about 20% of their students. No student should leave feeling a failure!

Bruce Hammonds said...

Schools do seem to be more serious places these days.I have aways believed that education is too important to take too seriously. If there isn't a sense of fun and excitement something is lost. Schools seem so intent in 'proving' they have 'added value' to their 'targets' that they can't see the 'wood for the trees'. Lost in maze of shonky graphs and 'evidence based' data. Technocrats from the 20th Century still rule!