Hmm...Imagine that...

So I gave my class a learning styles test...Suprisingly enough, many of my discipline problems were magically explained. The kinesthetic learners were the ones that tended to want to wander around the classroom, while the visual learners would start doodling in class when I was in the middle of a lecture. It opened my eyes to the need for differentiated instruction and for the need to change things up a bit so that all of my students could get involved in the learning process. It made me feel pretty bad that it took me this long to figure it out, because I feel like I had left some of my students out in the cold so far this year because of my lack of different teaching styles and methods. It would be so much easier if there were a "cookie-cutter" approach to teaching where you could just do it one way and everybody learns. But if you adopt a "my way or the highway" approach and don't adapt your lessons for the different learning styles, there's gonna be a lot of "hitchhikers" in our classrooms.