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Complete Guide to the Learning Styles Inservice System, The

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Professors Rita Dunn and Kenneth Dunn are experience educators and experts on learning styles who have successfully collaborated to present a comprehensive one volume survey of learning styles for teacher training sessions that will enable the student teacher and experienced classroom instructor on how to identify adults' learning styles, understanding and use global and analytical approaches, design tactual and kinesthetic resources, design contract activity packages and programmed learning sequences, and manage the implementation of learning styles training. Highly recommended and "reader friendly", the step-by-step procedures comprising The Complete Guide To The Learning Styles Inservice System will prove invaluable for in-service coordinators in the retraining and retention of professional teachers at the primary, secondary, collegiate, and adult education levels.

For over 30 years, the Dunns have labored to help teachers to be responsive to how children learn. Much research (by more than 115 tertiary instituitions) and applications have been done using their Learning Style Model with very positive results. "Learning style is the way each person begins to concentrate on, process, internalize and retain new and difficult academic information (p.11). There are five basic stimuli with 23 elements. 1. Environmental (sound, light, temperature and seating-design). 2. Emotional (motivation, persistence, responsibility, i.e. conformity/non-conformity, and structure). 3. Sociological or people patterns (learning alone, with peers, team, adult or with a variety). 4. Physiological (perceptual: auditory, visual, tactual, kinesthetic; time-of-day energy level, intake and mobility). 5. Psychological (global vs. analytic, hemisphericity, impulsive vs. reflective). These are summarised in a sketch chart that is found in many of the Dunns' books. This book gives excellent up-to-date coverage of the basics and research studies and provides detailed material for teachers to experience the process of learning styles themselves. One query is the choice of the outdated and simplisitic Triune Brain Theory for much of the illustrations. It was first presented by Dr. McClean in 1949. However, its simplicity might help us to better grasp the different designs that will match different learning styles. If all in-service teachers could go through this system of personal development, they would be much better equipped to identify learning styles and design the challenging and much needed tactual (touching and manipulating materials) and kinesthetic (whole-body movement and real-life experiences) resources. So are the abilities to design Contract Activity Package (CAP) to help students to learn at their own speed and Programmed Learning Sequences (PLS) for independent small-step learning. Education will finally nurture the "giftedness" in every child--an overriding dream, I believe, underlying all the Dunns' books and work.