Snowflakes and Smarts: Teaching the Way Your Students Learn (Part 4)

Written by Dwayne Ulmer

Part Four in a Five-Part Series

Have you have stopped to think about how smart you are? For that matter, have you ever stopped to think about how smart the teenagers you teach may be? As you have been reading the last several weeks, "smarts" is not necessarily a reference to levels of intelligence, but rather to ways people are smart. Everyone is intelligent in some way.

Creative and effective teaching is finding the way the teens you teach best learn and then directing your teaching to their smarts. Two more areas of smarts are "picture smart" and "word smart," or visual and verbal.

Often both of these types of intelligence go hand in hand. What you do (visually) speaks so loud sometimes people can't hear what you say (verbally), and what you say (words) often needs to clarify what folks see (pictures).

Word Smarts
People who have word smarts are verbal in nature have a good grasp of language. Often they are good communicators both in the written and/or oral word, and they enjoy teaching that uses both.

As teachers, we have often heard that lecture is a poor choice of teaching methodology, but with this group, there are students who prefer this approach to learning, as long as it is not overused. These learners like to:

• Listen
• Read
• Discuss
• Answer questions
• Hear Stories
• Do Interviews
• Write
• Describe

Picture Smarts
People who are visual in nature like to see things to reinforce their learning. Often they are artistic and graphic in nature, although they don't necessarily have to be talented in this area.

Some of these learners just like to see outlines, diagrams, photos, pictures, cartoons, and demonstrations. Others like to be able to draw or create pictures as well.

These learners tend to see things in their mind's eyes as well as in the concrete world.

Effective teaching will involve some visual and verbal methodology in addition to elements of the other styles you've read about. In the final part of our series, we'll find out about "thinking" and "doing" learners.