Teaching Styles

and Strategies:
INTERVENTIONS TO ENRICH

INSTRUCTIONAL DECISION-MAKING

by

Harvey F. Silver, J. Robert Hanson,

Richard W. Strong
and Patricia B. Schwartz

Third Edition
1996

Published by the Thoughtful Education Press

Crestwood Professional Building, Suite #23
941 Whitehorse Avenue
Trenton, NJ 08610
800-962-4432
www.silverstrong.com
 1
CHAPTER ONE

Introduction,
Definitions,
& Teaching
Processes
Introduction
Teaching strategies are nothing new. Plato,
Aristotle, St. Paul and Aquinas all had their
favorites. Today we hear about Skinner, A.S.
Neill, Bruner, Torrance, Taba and Hunter. These
teachers—and many more—have all presented
instructional strategies that matched the needs
of students’ perceived learning strategies. These
needs were all different. This is because, then
and now, we all learn differently. Different
cultures impose different learning requirements;
needs are different. The lessons we learn
are different. Thus, there is no right or wrong
strategy, but rather the mismatching of
strategies and learners. All strategies and their
related teaching styles have their place. The
key to good teaching is to see how learner and
strategy best fit together. Good teaching, or fully
professional teaching, means that a teacher can
move from style to style, strategy to strategy,
and learner to learner to create those climates
and implement those strategies most conducive
to learning different kinds of objectives.
Teaching Styles and Strategies is a practical
directory of teaching strategies. The manual has
one purpose: to enrich the practice of teaching.
The use of the strategies provide no painless
solutions to the mysteries of good teaching,
nor does their use represent a proven pathway
to teaching success. Rather, the use of the
strategies allows the practitioner to create a
classroom atmosphere for the achievement of
specific educational goals. One strategy is not
superior to any other. One strategy is not totally
different from all the others. Instead, each
strategy has a particular purpose, and each
contains elements of both cognitive and
affective functioning. The strategies may be
used singly or in combination, one at a time,
or many at one time. The strategies, in various
combinations and sequences, represent a
classroom management system.
Teaching Styles and Strategies was written
with the conviction that there are a variety of
ways to enrich the instructional process within
the confines and existing resources of the typical
8 Teaching Styles And Strategies
classroom. The strategies proposed require no
additional equipment or materials.
They require no special places or physical
arrangements. Rather, the strategies are ways
to evoke responses in particular learning
environments pertinent to the nature of the
content to be learned.
Teaching Style
Teaching strategies do, however, differ
from teaching styles. Anyone who teaches
(or communicates in any way) has a style. A
teaching style is a reflection of the individual’s
value system regarding human nature and of the
kinds of goals and environments that enhance
human learning. One’s teaching style represents
a conscious (or unconscious) enacting of the
ways one prefers to learn and remembers being
taught. It is exhibited in preferred or repeated
behaviors. Some teaching behaviors are
naturally more comfortable for one style than
for others. Teaching styles tend to support
particular kinds of teaching and their related
subject matters, to the general exclusion of
other styles and their related contents. No
individual displays all of the characteristics
of any particular teaching style, nor do the
characteristics of any particular teaching
style explain all of a teacher’s behavior.
Environmental, cultural, and inherited
characteristics invariably modify an
individual’s behavior.
Teaching Strategies Defined
A teaching strategy is a particular set of steps
to evoke from learners a specific set of desired
behaviors. Teaching strategies are deliberate
efforts by the teacher to vary the mode of
presentation to more appropriately represent
the functions (cognitive and affective) inherent
in a particular learning objective. In the teaching
strategies as much effort is devoted to the
learner’s role as to the teacher’s role. In the
use of the strategies, teacher and learner
become a team with announced goals and
clearly identified procedures for reaching
these goals.
Learning Styles Defined
The 25 strategies described in this Manual
facilitate one or more of the four basic teaching
styles of the Thoughtful Education Model.
These four styles, developed from the research
of Carl Gustav Jung1 and Isabel Briggs Myers2,
provide a framework for analyzing and
categorizing teaching and learning behaviors.
This categorization places a learner’s dominant
behaviors in one of four distinct groupings.
Jung’s theory argues that learning and teaching
behavior is not random, but rather is a reflection
of one’s developed or accessible functions
for perception (how data are perceived or
collected), and how these same data are judged
and mentally processed, i.e., how the individual
comes to conclusions about the meaning and
importance of specific data.
Four Jungian Functions
The two ways of perceiving or finding out
about persons, places, or things are through
one’s senses, or on the opposite pole of the same
axis, through one’s intuition.
The sensing orientation focuses on things
as they appear. Sensors assume that what
their senses tell them is what exists. Sensing
deals with shape, color, texture, and the
arrangement of things. The sensor operates
in the here and now.
The intuitive orientation focuses on the
inner meanings and relationships of what
is occurring. Intuition deals with seeing
possibilities, insights, and interpretations of
what might be. The intuitor operates in the
near and longer-term future.
The two ways of judging one’s perceptions
are thinking and feeling. Thinking judgments
are made on the basis of facts, logic, analysis
and external evidence. Decision-making for the
thinker is more logical and impersonal. Feeling
judgments are made on the basis of values,
personal beliefs, subjective responses, and
internal evidence. Decision-making for the
feeler is more personal and based on like/dislike
judgments. Jung’s theory says that we tend
to prefer one perception and one judgment
function over their opposites. We all use all
four functions, but not at the same time or with
the same frequency. Preferences develop like
muscles: the more they are used, the stronger
they become. Preferences for perception and
judgment are the comfortable behaviors we
develop over time. These preferences in turn
become our learning and teaching styles.
Jung’s Theory of Type
Jung theorized the two sets of opposing
function, i.e., sensing versus intuition and
thinking versus feeling, as a picture or archetype
of human behavior. The form the archetypal
picture takes is that of a mandala. Each function
in the four-sided mandala represents a universal
characteristic found in all human behavior. The
mandala, a symbolic representation of the four-
fold character of life is pictured in Figure 1-1.
The pairing of the perception and judgment
functions results in four different styles or types.
These styles can be summarized briefly by
key behaviors:
The Sensing-Thinker (ST) or Mastery
learner can be characterized as realistic,
practical, and matter-of-fact. This type of
learner is efficient and results-oriented. They
prefer action to words and involvement to
theory, and have a high energy level for doing
things that are pragmatic, logical and useful.
ST learners prefer to perceive the world through
their senses and thus live in the “here and now.”
They also rely on thinking to make decisions,
and are concerned about logical consequences
more than personal feelings. The ST learners
perceive the world in terms of things tangible
to the senses, rather than abstract or symbolic
ideas, theories, or models. The ST learner is
objective, efficient, and goal-oriented.
The Sensing-Feeler (SF) or Interpersonal
learner can be characterized as sociable,
friendly, and interpersonally oriented. This type
of learner is very sensitive to people’s feelings.
They prefer to learn about things that directly
Introduction, Definitions & Teaching Processes 9