Background Information
The Major Premises of Learning Styles
1. There are four major learning styles.
v They are all equally valuable.
v Students need to be comfortable about their own unique learning styles.
2. All students need to be taught in all four ways in order to be comfortable and successful part
of the time while being stretched to develop other learning abilities at other times.
v All students will shine at different places in the learning cycle, so they will learn from
each other.
3. There is a need for the development and integration of all four styles of learning.
4. Students will come to accept their strengths and learn to capitalize on them while developing
a healthy respect for the uniqueness of others and furthering their ability to learn in
alternative styles without the pressure of being wrong.
5. The more comfortable we are about who we are, the more freely we learn from others.
6. Human beings perceive (input) experience and information in different ways. Human beings
process (output) experience and information in different ways. These perceiving and
processing combinations form our own unique learning styles.
Task Rotation: Comfort and Challenge
v When we teach within a student's style, we increase the student's sense of comfort and
validate his or her way of thinking and feeling.
v When we teach outside the student's style, we increase the student's sense of tension and
challenge the student's ways of thinking and feeling.
v Neither comfort nor challenge is motivating in and of itself. The goal of education is not to
make students comfortable nor is it to keep them perched perpetually on the edge of their
seats with new challenges. The goal of education is to strike a proper balance between
comfort and challenge, one that will ensure that the students feel good about themselves at
the same time that it inspires them to move beyond themselves. We can best achieve this
balance by rotating the students' learning tasks among the various learning styles. We call this
process Task Rotation, and when it is successful, we say that we are keeping the comfort
challenging our students.
v The best news is that in balancing the roles of tension and challenge, we, ourselves, also
become better teachers.
PROTEAM DREAMQUEST CURRICULUM
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