Students exhibit varied learning styles and multiple intelligences as each of them displays his or her set of talents. Knowledge of various learning styles provide us teachers a useful explanation of why students perform differently on different tasks. But it seems not all are integrating this knowledge in their classes. Most often than not, teachers tend to use “one size fits all” to ease instruction and designing lesson plans. Still, relying only to learning styles will not do much if we want to extract students’ best performance in our class. Rather than focusing or relying on learning styles alone, we can focused instead on metacognition, in which teachers can use strategies that can be adapted and applied based on the learning environment. In addition, fusing these two (learning styles and metacognition), will aid students develop key metacognitive behaviors. But, let us first describe each for better understanding.
Learning styles. This is categorizing our students as to visual, auditory or kinesthetic learners. Though it was cited from studies that visual learners learn best by presenting information visually, they can also learn information in other ways. For example, a auditory students who prefers to learn better ehnr her notes are spoken aloud into a recording device and revisit it later. But, she he/she may also find that when studying for a Science test, drawing diagrams (visual) and manipulating simple machines (kinesthetic) work also for her.
On the contrary, metacognition, often referred to as “thinking about thinking,” is a construct originally proposed by Brown (1987), Schraw (1998) among others in the educational and cognitive psychology. A metacognitive student is aware of his or her own learning process and adjusts these processes accordingly. When dealing with mistakes in his/her anticipated results, he/she will quickly realize a mistake and try another. As they know themselves, they also understand that each learning task may require a different tactic of strategy. Teaching for metacognition therefore, helps students discover for themselves how they learn best and discover their abilities. By understanding its principles, they are able to plan, analyze and evaluate their own learning.
Hence, we teachers have another strategy aside from knowing only our students’ learning styles. Through metacognition, we may be able to achieve the 21st Century Education’s true goals. Let us be advocates in reframing our focus in teaching to be able to produce creative, adaptive, world class citizens of this country.
By: Mrs. Vilma S. Fernando | Master Teacher II | Bataan National High School
