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Insider tips to different learning styles.
Andrea Koenig has amicably left the classroom at Holland Hall — but not the teaching profession — to operate her burgeoning tutoring business full time. In her instruction Koenig uses her own mixed bag of teaching methods, cultivated through years as a college professor and middle school teacher, her MFA education, and her intuition, a teacher’s greatest gift, she says.
Her methods include The Schools Attuned Program, Lucy Calkins’ Reading and Writing Curriculum, and the tried and true programs of the St. Charles Borromeo nuns employed in 1970s Tacoma, Wash.
The Schools Attuned Program
Tailoring the classroom to "All Kinds of Minds."
The All Kinds of Minds program, based on the work of Mel Levine M.D., offers learning strategies for students depending on how their brain is wired.
Some students have difficulties with short-term memory or consolidating information into long-term memory, says Koenig. Or, students may not have the mental energy to complete assignments, or what is termed weak mental energy controls.
They might also have trouble determining what is the most important information delivered during class, called saliency determination. “Teachers can shift the way they teach to accommodate these vulnerabilities,” Koenig says.
Tip: A student who has difficulty holding information in short-term memory can learn to chunk data and use mnemonic devices. If a task has 10 steps, teacher can offer only one or two at a time.
Lucy Calkins' Reading and Writing Curriculum
The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University
“Schools across the country, including Holland Hall, are sending their faculty to Columbia to study with Calkins,” says Koenig. Under the Calkins approach, middle school students learn through a workshop environment.
Tip: “A Calkins classroom hums with independent activity,” says Koenig. “I conference with one or two students at a time in the middle of the classroom, while all the other students are writing on their own, peer-editing, self-editing, or using class resources to strengthen their work.”
St. Charles Borromeo Catholic School
The Tried and True Methods of the Nuns
Koenig teaches, “unglamorous, old school grammar” with some sentence diagramming and the five-paragraph expository essay.
“I teach these old chestnuts more or less as I learned them from the good Sisters — not, and I repeat not, for lack of exposure to, or interest in, more modern methodologies, but because some of the old ways remain effective,” she says.
