Education: Critical Review of Some of the Latest Pedagogical Theories
Successful teaching involves much more than reciting information to a room full of students. Instead, successful teaching requires a foundation of pedagogical philosophy that guides the teacher in the methods to best teach understanding with their students. More so, to build this pedagogical philosophy that is required for successful teaching, a teacher must constantly be teaching themselves by maintaining up to date on the latest theory and practice developments. This paper will critically review some of the latest pedagogical theories, as put forth by some of education's most leading scholars. Particularly, the theories that are proposed and analyzed within these seven articles focus on the general concept of how to better teach a rapidly diversifying classroom. With classrooms becoming more and more inclusive of abilities, languages, races, backgrounds and social-economic status, the ability to reach every student's unique learning needs becomes more and more of a challenge. In order to meet this new demand of teaching to a diversified and inclusive classroom, many theorists are advocating the use of a personal style of learning. The theory behind this approach is a notion of work in understanding individual cognitive
One of the most significant challenges that a teacher using a learning style centered approach to teaching is the growing pressure to "teach to the test". To exemplify their point, the authors focus on the trend to eliminate arts-based and physical-based, such as writing, music, physical education and recess, from the elementary curriculum in favor of more time to teach to the test. In other words, some students learn a concept better through group work while other prefer visuals while still others prefer individual work. Teaching to the test refers to the practice of utilizing standardized test to assess the learning of students. As each student learns in his or own unique way, controlled by such factors as their unique backgrounds, experiences and cultures, each teacher must make it their responsibility to teach to the specific styles of each student. In order to accomplish this goal, the teacher needs to put the student first and use the subject matter as a means of teaching the student to love learning and thus to grow into a life long learner. In order to do this, as Burton states and the previously mentioned authors all have advocated, a personalized learning approach needs to be used. refer to as "Multiple Intelligences". Added to this is the fact that each student's learning style is influenced by their particular backgrounds and culture. Instead, various students are smart, or intelligent, at various things. In other words, the psychology of intelligence needs not be left in isolation but instead developed through teaching and learning. To do this, the teacher needs to adopt a diverse, personalized teaching style. As Castleman and Littky make it abundantly clear, the way to do this is to make learning enjoyable, which can only be accomplished by using a learning style based approach to teaching. Rayner, and the research he has done, concludes that such an approach to teaching is truly the "best practice" to take.
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