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Thriving in Academe

What can we do when the teacher’s learning (and teaching) style limits student learning in the classroom?

College teachers are currently tackling overwhelming changes in technology, assessment expectations, and an increased pressure to accomplish classroom teaching, as well as research and scholarly publication.

We also face the challenge of moving from teacher-centered to student-centered classrooms to stimulate deep learning. To complicate matters further, students often provide challenges that teachers are prone to view as personality or civility issues.

What’s a teacher to do? How can teachers make wise choices about approaches to teaching, technology, and classroom research to deepen student learning?

Teachers can benefit from using a lens through which they can see themselves, their students, and their content and methods objectively.

For more than 20 years, I’ve used the Kolb Learning Styles Inventory as a way to represent, graphically and conceptually, the learning styles of teachers and their students. Understanding your own learning style is a first step you as a teacher can take toward beginning classroom research to engage students in deep learning.

Using the Kolb inventory, teachers identify both their own and their students learning styles to better recognize, and respond to, the different ways their students learn. This makes it possible for teachers to comfortably use a variety of teaching styles and strategies to foster student learning.

Meet Laura L. B. Border
Laura L. B. Border directs the graduate teacher program and the Colorado Preparing Future Faculty Network at the University of Colorado at Boulder and was president of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network from 2002–04. She edits the Journal of Graduate and Professional Student Development, co-edited Preparing Future Faculty, a double issue of the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching in 2006, co-authored five editions of Collage, a college French program, and co-edited Teaching for Diversity in the Jossey-Bass New Directions for Teaching and Learning series. Her interests include faculty and TA development, nonbiased teaching, professional development for academics, and improving her own teaching.

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