Styles of Learning and Teaching
Elementary school teachers (particularly kindergarten through second grade) are cognisant of incorporating multiple learning styles into their teaching as much as possible. Almost every learning objective was taught using multiple styles (primarily: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic). This observation spans over all of the classrooms we observed, even though the material being studied and the grade level varied. An example of this was demonstrated in Ms. Webb’s kindergarten class through the reading excerpt with George Washington. She passed out a copy of the reading to each individual child and she read the book out loud (audio) while the children read along with her (visual). After the paragraph was read, the children proceeded to color in a picture that tied the paragraph they just read (kinesthetic). We found this to be an interesting observation considering the body of literature questioning the validity of the learning styles approach.
