08.03.08
Differentiated Learning is Only For Children
I spent the past week co-presenting at the Keystone Technology Integrators Summit, held at Bucknell University. In as many of the cases as I could attend, the presenters/instructors tried to hold the “lecture” to a minimum so that people could have time right then and there to apply new skills. In my case, I tried to use my 90 minutes as such:
- 20 minutes: Introductions, present new information
- 60 minutes: Participants worked in groups or individually with two instructors floating
- 10 minutes: Share & conclusions
I thought it worked great. We DID have desks that teachers could move or collect around for group activities.
But how many times have you been to a conference, or even professional development where the delivery style was lecture? Can you fully learn something when it is presented lecture style? Now, I recognize that you can “pack” 50 people in on chairs where you might only fit 30 with desks. But still – why not ask people to turn around and talk to people nearby to discuss a topic? Probably the best conference I’ve been to was EduCon at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. We utilized existing classrooms with desks and chairs – and nearly every speaker (there were some exceptions) asked the audience to contribute, to add to the material being delivered. At the end, not only did we the participants learn something, but the presenter learned something as well. And in at least one session we created something new with the guidance of the presenters.
At NECC, I attended the Constructivist Celebration hosted by Gary Stager and I have to tell you – I was blown away by the format: let us tell you just a few nuggets of information – now go play while we, the experts, are still standing here. I learned about ONE thing, but I mastered it. I would not have been able to do that if we had instead received 6 presentations throughout the day.
So I hope at this point you realize that my title of this post is sarcastic. If we truly believe that people have multiple intelligences, learning styles, and that they should learn things differently even if they are in the same room – we should all take this into account when we present at conferences. AND at teacher inservices. AND in our classrooms. Take the time to present, allow time for practice and discussion, and reflection. Use multiple methods of presenting information. Provide attendees with visual and textual cues, as well as resources for them to use if they need more time than your session to digest the content.
