Evaluating Teaching and Learning Styles - Essay Example

?Physical Education Teaching and learning physical education requires a tactical approach. Here we evaluate teaching and learning approaches used within physical education and their ability to facilitate national curriculum. According to Grout & Long (2009), the most common approaches to teaching are reciprocal, command, self-check, inclusion, guided discovery, and divergent discovery. Others are the convergent discovery, individual program, learner initiated, and self-teaching. The three main learning styles of students are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (Williams & Cliffe 2011). In evaluating these teaching and learning styles, their negative and positive impacts at the national curriculum are used as well as how they help to deliver its aspects. Reciprocal teaching style is among the most widely used teaching approach in physical education. In this teaching style, the teacher deals with the learning objectives and class content while the students take responsibility of teaching each other (Virgillo 1997). This teaching approach combines well with either visual or auditory learning styles. When in combination with either visual or auditory learning style, this approach assists in delivering national PE curriculum in several ways. One of the ways is that it enables students’ participation in curriculum delivery thus enhancing curriculum understanding. Another way is that they make curriculum delivery more student-centered thus ensuring that everything delivered by the curriculum is beneficial to the students. This teaching and learning approach has both advantages and disadvantage that makes it insufficient in administering national curriculum for PE. National curriculum for PE involves developing skills in physical activities, making and applying decisions, and developing physical and mental capacity (QCA 2007). One of the positive impacts of this teaching and learning approach is that it promotes making and applying of decisions. This is due to its student-centeredness. The other positive impact is that it could assist in developing physical and mental capacity. By giving the students the center stage to train each other the class content, they are forced to think and reason out, which promote their mental capacity. It also encourages participation that could promote physical capacity among the students. However, this teaching and learning approach minimizes teachers overall participation in the students learning process. Marching students and teachers experience together ensures a successful learning outcome (Vickerman 2006). Therefore, the minimization of teacher’s participation is a negative impact that this teaching and learning approach can bring to the implementation of national curriculum for PE. It is believed that it can hinder skills development in physical activities and thus hinder achievement of successful learning outcomes. That is why it is always advisable to use this teaching and learning approach in combination with other approaches. The other most widely used learning style is the command style. In this learning style, the teacher makes all the decisions in the learning process (Mohnsen 2008). Command style can combine well with all our three learning styles, which are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. When combined with these learning styles it assists in the delivering of the PE curriculum in several ways. According to Stidder (2010), this type of teaching style could promote safety during the implementation of the curriculum. This is because the teacher is always under control of all the activities undertaken during a learning process. This actually makes this teaching and learning approach to be very popular in PE education due to the risky activities involved. When this approach is adapted in implementing a PE Curriculum, both positive and negative impacts are experienced. This kind of approach allows delivering of information to a large group of people in a short period (Galligan 2000). The national curriculum for PE is large in terms of content and thus in most cases the time allocated is not sufficient. Furthermore, there is always a need to administer it to a large group of students within the little time allocated. This makes this approach very fundamental when it comes to implementation of the curriculum for physical education. However, it also has some negative impacts especially when used alone to implement a curriculum. The major negative impact of this approach is that it does not give students freedom of choice to reason out a solution to a particular problem (Puhse & Gerber 2005). This discourages making and applying of decisions and development of mental capacity. Another teaching style that could be adapted for teaching physical education is the inclusion style. According to Laker (2002), this style involves setting suitable learning challenges, responding to students’ diverse learning needs, and assisting students to overcome learning barriers. When teaching physical education curriculum, chances of encountering students with wide range of abilities and weaknesses are high. Such cases can only be effectively handled using an inclusion teaching approach. This is because the approach put into consideration the poorly skilled students and those with special need by designing a way of ensuring that they are not left behind. Therefore, when this approach is used to teach physical education, all students gain almost equally despite their individual weaknesses. The inclusion teaching technique when combined with an appropriate learning style has several positive impacts on the physical education curriculum implementation. One of the main purposes of physical education is to foster students’ social domain. Inclusion teaching employs cooperative learning in physical education that fosters social domain of the students (Dyson & Carey 2012). This is major positive impact of this teaching style on physical education curriculum. Another positive impact is that it enables teachers to effective assess students during curriculum implementation. Since this teaching approach puts into consideration diverse strengths and weaknesses of students, then assessment is made far much better. It also increases performance since individuals are given tasks that suite their individual capabilities. This teaching and learning approach has some setbacks when used in implementing a physical education curriculum. According to Ayers & Suriscsany (2010), there are unmotivated students at every level of a physical education instruction. These students drag others behind when an inclusion teaching and learning approach is used to implement physical education curriculum. Therefore, the inclusion learning style should not be used alone because of this negative impact. Another negative impact of this teaching style is that it can make a teacher to concentrate more on weak students and forget other students’ needs. This can decline the overall effectiveness of the physical education curriculum in ensuring that all learners learn the required content. The self-check is the other teaching style explored in this paper. In this teaching style, the learners use a self-check performance criteria task to evaluate their own learning (Hardy & Mawer 1999). The learning activities in this case are designed and implemented by the teacher although a teacher can adjust them depending on students’ evaluation. This teaching style is a type of teaching style that involves both the teacher and the student in learning process. Like the reciprocal learning style, it is also very much student-centered and thus it can promote decision making among students (Kirk, MacDonald & O’sullivan 2006). It could also combine very well with any kind of learning style of a student. The self-check learning style also has its positive side and its negative side. Its student-centeredness makes it very suitable for promoting mental capability and students’ decision-making. These are some of the most important aspects of a national curriculum for PE education. Self-check learning style also has the advantage of shifting the power of providing feedback to individual student (Gibbons 2007). This could promote the competence and performance evaluation that could help in improving instruction. Through this teaching approach, it is possible to incorporate students’ creativity in teaching physical education, which could make learning very interesting to the students. However, like the previously discussed teaching style, this one too has its own negative impacts. One of its most critical negative impacts resembles that of the reciprocal teaching style. Like the reciprocal teaching approach, this approach also minimizes the teachers’ participation in the student’s learning process. This could make teaching ineffective especially in assessment process. Another negative impact of this teaching style is that it discourages group work in learning (Myers 2012). As we well know some physical education content are better taught using group activities rather than individualized activities. This could make this teaching style inappropriate for most of the content of the national physical education curriculum. Guided discovery teaching style is the other teaching style that could be used by a teacher in teaching physical education. In this teaching style, the teacher identifies a target and then leads the students to discover it (Jones, Hughes, & Kingston 2008). When this teaching style is adapted by a teacher, students learn mainly through their personal experience. This teaching style could be very effective when used on students who have few or no physical weaknesses. However, when the students involved have some incapability, it becomes very ineffective. In implementing this type of a teaching style, the teacher can set different learning situations for a physical activity and then guide the students in the series of activities involved. In such cases the students performs the activities themselves after being guided while the teacher just observes as they learn. Like the other teaching styles, this style has its own positive impacts on the national curriculum for physical education and some negative impacts as well. One of the positive impacts of this style as indicated by Brain (2002) is that it does not need a lot of time and learning is good at the start. This means that it could be very effective for activities that do not require a lot of time. The national curriculum for PE involves making of informed choices about healthy active lifestyle (QCA 2007). This teaching process could also facilitate achievement of this objective hence it should be used in implementing national curriculum for physical education. The main negative impact of guided discovery teaching style is that it can compromise safety of the students when undertaking the activities designed by the curriculum. As a result, it is inappropriate for an introductory lesson of a unit (Green & Hardman 2004). This is because it could lead to injuries among the students involved. However, for any other lesson it could be suitable. The main objective of physical education is to enable students to be able to analyze their performance and identify their strengths and weaknesses. A teacher plays a very significant role in the process of achievement of these goals. This teaching style involved less teacher’s participation in the learning process thus discouraging achievement of this main objective of the national physical education curriculum. The last teaching style that is evaluated and examined in this paper is the divergent teaching style. This style according to Kassing & Jay (2003) provides experience that is applicable beyond the field where physical education is taking place. It is also a student-centered teaching style. This is a kind of a teaching style where the students control the major learning activities. Divergent teaching style calls for students, creativity when learning physical education. Creativity is a major requirement of the national curriculum of physical education and thus in promoting creativity this teaching style could assist in implementing the curriculum. This teaching style is also compatible with all type of learning styles that a student might have and thus it could be applied various students. Like other teaching styles, this one too has its own positive impacts on the national curriculum for PE as well as negative impacts. Its major positive impact is that it promotes creative problem solving among students (Shimon 2011). Thus, this teaching style encourages students to be more decisive. Moreover, it develops their mental capabilities due to the creativity involved. These are what are emphasized most by the national curriculum for physical education. Majority of the activities undertaken in this curriculum are aimed in the achievement of such objectives. It also encourages group work activities. These make this teaching style to be very appropriate for most of the activities undertaken in the curriculum for physical education and thus a teacher should not fail to use it. Majority of the negative impacts of this teaching style when used to implement the national curriculum for physical education are identical to those of other student-centered teaching styles. In this teaching style, the students are the ones who play the major role in the learning process. Therefore, the teacher fails to have the necessary opportunity of investing his creativity and experience in learning, which could interfere with learning of difficult tasks. Because of this limitation of this teaching style, it could not be used to teach complex lesson units. It could also be inappropriate to use it to teach physical education to less creative students and students with significant academic weaknesses. As identified in the beginning of this paper, many teaching style could be adapted by a teacher for teaching physical education. However, because of the length of the paper, we have not been able to examine and evaluate all of them. The ones that we have been able to examine and evaluate are applicable in different situations. This could indicate that none of the teaching styles is sufficient on its own to teach the national curriculum for physical education. In addition, different learners of physical educations have different learning styles. Some of the teaching styles are compatible with all the learning styles while others are only compatible with some. Therefore, to select a teaching style, the learning style of students should be considered. In our evaluation, we found out that each teaching style has both positive and negative impacts. Therefore, none of them should be used for all the lessons of national physical education curriculum. 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