Managing teacher education and in-service programs: Learning styles perspective

Urban schools and minority students. It is possible that the quality of teaching is inadequate only in urban schools attended by poor children who are members of minority groups. In a family with three or more children, one will do well, another will perform adequately and another will be bored or frustrated on an almost daily basis.
• Special education and need for in-service. Parents are led to believe that special education is a legitimate classification for students who are unable to learn. But if future teachers were being taught to identify and teach to their student’s learning styles during their initial training, the need for frequent retraining would be drastically diminished.
• Lack of student discipline and/or motivation. It is often said that students are not as well disciplined or as highly motivated as students used to be. Motivation is not biologically imposed; it results from students’ experiences and interests. Teachers who are unable to motivate and teach their students need to learn how to do so.
• Children taking prescription medications. Physicians may not understand that active and nonconforming children learn differently from the way passive, conforming children do. Parents allow their active children to be drugged because they are unaware that their children can learn; that traditional instructional approaches are not responsive to how their children learn.
• Cultural diversity and immigrant populations. In a study of diverse cultures, opportunity influences individuals’ ability to develop specific areas of talent that may eventually lead to giftedness. In cultures that respected art, higher percentages of artistically gifted students were found; and so with other domains. If culture so influences academic achievement, why not train teachers to teach lessons