Are there too many teaching styles?

  You have to love college education classes. They throw as many types of learning styles and ways to make lesson plans at you as they can. From Bloom's taxonomy to Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, I have probably learned about a half dozen of them on my own. They are systems that attempt to reach every style of learning in every way possible.
  How do you, as an educator, wade through all these forms? Teachers have a tendency to make the mistake of trying too many styles or just using the same one systematically. I have a revolutionary thought for you, pull out the best elements of each style that you are comfortable with and create your own learning system. That's right! You don't have to jump around and you don't have to be "stuck" in any one style.
  Many times, when we are given the latest craze, handed down by well-meaning administrators who have not taught a class in over five years, we try it to death. It interrupts the learning style that you have created and are comfortable with. Why not just pull away from it, one or two things that seem really cool to you, and take them for a test drive?

Image from edpsycinteractive.org

  Teaching is an art form and these art forms are ever-shifting as we mold our craft to better suit the needs of our classrooms. I prefer using Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences (MI) and applying it to a lesson plan system called 4MAT. Many teachers find 4MAT takes a long time to put together but it makes your total Unit cohesive and allows the capability of all learning styles the chance to perform in their best category while working on skills that they struggle with in the other intelligences. I have used it before and once you are used to setting it up, you can make a template in Word and it would take far less time to create the lesson plans.
  4MAT is the only lesson planning system that I have seen that incorporates MI, Myers-Brigg Personality, and the four big questions in the learning process. The questions are as simple as Why, What, How, and If. What 4MAT also takes into account are some of the most important parts of Bloom's taxonomy and which parts fit into the questions.
  My recommendation would be to learn and research the system, see if you like the idea of being able to reach all the learning styles at some point in the teaching process, and begin setting up over the summer. With any time you learn a new teaching style, there are going to be ideas that work and ones that don't but the journey is more fun than the results!