For the past few weeks I really thought about deleting my blog. It’s boring and I’ve lost track of my original focus. After much consideration I decided not to delete the entire thing because I have some entries that are tied to others and I do not want to delete those posts.

Updated: Rather than deleting my blog in its entirety I’ve archived posts that really aren’t relevant and I’ll reformat my blog…eventually.

Vaccinations always seem to be a controversial issue and one that can be a difficult decision for many parents in New Jersey.

Obama recently came to New Jersey to raise money for his campaign and enjoyed dinner at Bon Jovi’s house. While traveling to a fund raiser a group of about 50 people rallied nearby for parental choice on vaccinations.

For a full story see here.

For a link to see Obama’s unedited position statement regarding these issues made last year see here. For more recent information regarding Obama’s stance see here

For more information, including the upcoming rally in Trenton on September 18th at noon, see here

For more information about the New Jersey Coalition for Vaccination Choice see here

According to John Wills Lloyd of Teach Effectively as he comments on the D-Ed Reckoning site,

For those who trust their intuition more than scientific evidence, learning styles are alive and well.

For those of you who are ready to stop believing and want the proof in the name of “good teaching” there is some pretty compelling evidence here , here and here.

According to Professor Dan T. Willingham maker of the rapidly rising “Learning Styles Don’t Exist” You Tube video, teachers should forget about centering instruction on student learning styles and instead;

1. Teach for content meaning

He writes in his research,

An important finding from that research is that memory is usually stored independent of any modality. You typically store memories in terms of meaning—not in terms of whether you saw, heard, or physically interacted with the information.

2. Where appropriate teach to the content’s best modality

He also notes,

Experiences in different modalities simply for the sake of including different modalities should not be the goal. Material should be presented auditorily or visually because the information that the teacher wants students to understand is best conveyed in that modality.

In addition, John Wills Lloyd also comments on D-Ed Reckoning that,

Doubting learning styles is not the equivalent of saying “one size fits all.”

and he reminds us that non believers in learning styles actually,

favor adapting instruction for individual learners.

His post on Teach Effectively uses snazzy graphs to illustrate that if you really want to be a “good teacher” and have your lessons have the most powerful impact on your students then tailor your instruction to following:

3. Using formative assessment to guide instruction over any type of student based Learning Style theory

4. Combining formative assessment guided instruction with behavior modification techniques

So Virginia how do you want to teach, intuitively or effectively ?