Developing Strategies That Will Work for Multiple Learning Styles

Article: Macauley, William J. "Paying Attention to Learning Styles in Writing Center Epistemology, Tutor Training, and Writing Tutorials." Writing Lab Newsletter 28.9 (2004): 1-5. Web. 20 February 2013.

My goal this semester is to find new strategies to work with students with different learning styles, and so I turned to an article that focused around a whole Writing Center that was struggling to do the same thing. Macauley mentions that many of his tutors weren't reading the writing aloud, and this disengaged the tutee from the tutoring process altogether while they sat there and waited. After several failed attempts to get the tutors to understand the importance of this, he instead hosted a workshop, and had the tutors brainstorm different ways they could engage different types of learners.

Most of them focused on the basic three learning types: visual, audio, and kinesthetic. Some others however, also looked at new and more creative strategies that might stimulate multiple types of learning styles. My favorite strategy they came up with involved different colored sticky notes. They would take a series of basic ideas (if working on organization in the whole paper) or individual sentences (if working on a paragraph), and would then have the tutee move the sticky notes around physically to see how different organizations would work within their paper. For kinesthetic learners, physically moving the sticky notes around helps them to connect the ideas in their paper with the order they would most logically go in. While on the other hand, visual learners would be able to see just how each arrangement would work, and can easily rearrange them to note down how that will effect the argument.

Even though this is the same strategy, it's important to remember with each of these learning styles that you have to focus on different aspects of the activity while working with each of these learning styles. For the kinesthetic, the process of moving the sticky notes is what helps it click, while for the visual it's seeing the layout at the end. As I keep plugging along in my research, I'll need to look more into how the same strategy works differently for different learners.