Focus on the Student: Emphasizing Learning Styles

Over 225 people attended LIRT's Annual Conference Program on Sunday morning, June 25th at San Francisco's beautiful Westin St. Francis Hotel. Each of the program's three speakers added her own insights to learning styles and took questions from the audience to foster dialogue. The presenters included Gail Junion-Metz, President, Information Age Consultants, University Heights, Ohio; Lynn Sutton, Director, Undergraduate Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; and Debra Jones, Internet Librarian, Cabrillo College Library, Cabrillo College, Aptos, California.

Junion-Metz stressed the importance of training in the discipline of education for librarians, who must understand how individuals learn differently by age, personality, and other characteristics. The three modalities (auditory, visual, and kinesthetic), played a key role in Junion-Metz's lecture. One pertinent question at the end of Junion-Metz's presentation encapsulated the thoughts of many attendees: How does one apply the modalities in a fifty-minute period in the library classroom? She responded that instructors should mix teaching methods within each class to serve all students.

In outlining the design of the new undergraduate library at Wayne State, Lynn Sutton depicted how an appreciation of learning styles can inform sound facility planning. The planners of the new library at Wayne State envisioned a building that relied heavily on electronic formats of information, but they acknowledged that the library remains a place. The library's design, policies, and procedures will balance the learning preferences of a diverse, urban clientele to gird them for lifelong learning.

Debra Jones explored the critical elements of instructional design. An outline of her presentation is available at http://www.cabrillo.cc.ca.us/thinking/focus.html. Jones broke instruction down to four essential components: learner, methods, objectives, and evaluation. Jones challenged instructors to inculcate critical thinking skills in students. She also recommended that instructors employ instructional design models to foster solid teaching in which they sharply focus on the centerpiece of instruction: the student.

Oral comments after the program were enthusiastic. Program attendees sampled three unique, but complementary views of learning theory that they might apply to their own library classrooms.