Why is it important for teachers to understand and use a variety of teaching styles?

Even though every instructor is unique, the prevalent style of teaching has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, along with the new cultural norms and technological advancements.

Educational researchers today define at least five different teaching styles on a spectrum that moves from a teacher-centered approach to a student-centered one:

Other teaching methods outside of the core five exist as well. The Spectrum of Teaching Styles in Physical Education defines 11 distinct teaching styles that can be used to coach students in schools and universities.

While most instructors can be described by a single personal model of teaching, the best ones always adjust their teaching strategies to their students and the learning process at hand.

That’s why it’s important to know what the different teaching styles are and have a clear idea of how to use them when needed.

5 different teaching styles to use today

A lot of educators in traditional teaching environments with decades of experience are not aware of their primary teaching style, even though their approach to teaching has a direct effect on student participation and student engagement.

Let’s explore five teaching style examples to show how broad differentiated instruction in classroom settings can be.

1. Lecturer
2. Demonstrator
3. Hybrid
4. Facilitator
5. Delegator

1. Lecturer

The lecturer style (sometimes called the formal authority style) is familiar to anyone who’s sat through long unidirectional lectures in giant university auditoriums.

This teaching style is often used with large groups of students, when a lot of interaction between the teacher and students is not feasible.

The subject matter in the lecturer style, most of the time, is singular and predetermined. Students are encouraged to take notes and ask questions at the end. There are usually no activities planned.

Pros

• Possible to teach large groups of students at once
• Easy to prepare lecturers

Cons

• Low information retention
• No active learning

2. Demonstrator

Under the demonstrator style, the teacher still retains a lot of authority but is more open to trying a student-centered approach to teaching.

You can see the demonstrator encouraging students to come up with problem-solving strategies, ask questions and simulate what they’ve just learned.

The demonstrator often goes beyond lectures, showing presentations, images, films and experiments. As a result, it’s more applicable to more learning styles.

Pros

• Incorporates a variety of teaching formats

Cons

• Doesn’t accommodate the needs of all students

3. Hybrid

The hybrid (also known as blended) style strives to strike a balance between teacher- and student-centered approaches.

Most of the time, the teachers who follow the hybrid style bring their own knowledge and expertise into the class. They still have a structure for every lecture but are able to adjust their flow and come up with the right activities to keep the students engaged.

While the hybrid approach tends to be quite effective in a variety of settings, it can make covering information-heavy courses difficult due to its slower pace.

Pros

• Students remain active and engaged for longer

Cons

• Can be less focused and slow
• Requires a lot of energy from the teacher

4. Facilitator

Shifting to an even more student-centered approach, there’s the facilitator style of teaching.

Instead of giving one-directional lectures, a facilitator encourages inquiry-based learning. Students learn by asking questions and discussing real-world case studies. Some other activities might be designed to improve problem-solving skills and help understand the subject matter better through practical challenges.

Pros

• Helps students develop self-sufficiency

Cons

• Doesn’t work well for theory-heavy classes

5. Delegator

The most student-centric teaching style of all is called the delegator style (also known as the group style). Here, the teacher is merely present as an observer, and it’s the group of students who are doing all the work.

Most of the learning in the delegator style happens peer-to-peer, through frequent collaborations and discussions. The instructor is practically removed from the position of authority and only facilitates the discussions instead.

The delegator style works best for lab-based experiments, group tutoring classes, creative writing, debates and other peer-to-peer activities.

Pros

• Encourages learning and collaboration among students

Cons

• Can be inefficient since students have to find the right answers for themselves

These are just five of the most popular teaching styles that instructors can choose from when creating their courses. Depending on the system you look at, there might be even more, as described in a paper titled Teaching Styles and Language Performance by Edgar R. Eslit and Mercedita B. Tongson.

Is one style of teaching better than others? 

As you can see from the list above, each style of teaching has its pros and cons. So there’s no definitive winner here — rather, you should learn to mix and match based on a situation.

When preparing your course content, you can imagine which teaching style would help your students learn the material best. If you’re not sure, try experimenting with a few different styles for the first few student cohorts to find out.

How to adapt teaching styles to different learning styles?

We’ve written about the four main types of learning styles before, which are essential for every instructor to understand.

There’s no doubt that different students shine under different teaching approaches.

There’s a famous “empty vessel” theory, for example, which asserts that students’ minds are essentially empty until teachers pour their knowledge into them, lecture-style.

But cooperative learning which requires more group work and would pair well with the facilitator or delegator style of teaching. Check out Cohort-Based Learning for a deeper dive into this kind of teaching style.

Interactive learning can be a great fit for the demonstrator or facilitator style, and so on.

Does classroom diversity influence my style of teaching? 

Another reason to have different teaching styles in your arsenal is the diversity of students you might see in your class. As students learn better by different approaches and at a different speed, you should be able to adjust your teaching style on the fly to maximize the learning opportunity for all.

It’s likely that your primary teaching style won’t be purely of the big five discussed above, but rather an ever-changing mix that would be unique to you and the students you teach.

In addition, as teachers lead students and help students become future leaders, you should be aware of the kind of leadership that you want to facilitate through your teaching.

How to create a perfect course online

Do you want to put your teaching style to practice? There’s no better way to do that than creating a brand new online course. The only thing you need is a course-creation platform to do that.

Thinkific is an intuitive and easy-to-use platform for all teachers to create beautiful online courses in no time. The platform adjusts easily to various teaching styles through the use of multimedia materials, from presentations to videos to quizzes to member communities.

Best of all, no coding skills are required. Just pick a gorgeous template and quickly customize it to your need with a drag-and-drop editor.

Get started today for free and see how easy creating your own course can be.

Without knowing the variety of learning styles in a class and without knowing their own teaching style, it is much harder for educators to get through to students who do not meet the expected norm: sit still, listen, only reply when asked, and so on.

By creating LSA Group Profiles, it is possible to find out the strengths of a class or group, but also to recognize students' hidden learning potential, as well as to avoid methods that lead to no learning failure. This will enable educators to divide your class into study groups or to mentor individual students separately as needed.

If then the personal Teaching Style is adapted to the learning needs of these sub-groups and additionally the learning preferences of individual pupils are considered, each pupil can be reached in their own way. This activates the whole class and leads to successful lessons. It is precisely this deliberate variety of methods that corresponds to personalized learning - each student is allowed to learn in his or her best way. Although this initially requires more preparatory work, the results are profound - not just for individual students, but for entire schools, even for entire families.

However, educators also experience another positive side effect, especially as they get to know their own teaching style better, therefore reducing stress in their daily teaching.

Benefits of Teaching Style Analysis (TSA):

By creating a personal TSA profile, educators can:

• gain important self-knowledge
• recognize their personal teaching style - from traditional to individualized
• compare their own learning style with their current teaching style
• show the most commonly used teaching strategies
• achieve long-term improvement in teaching success
• improve relationships with students/parents/colleagues
• reduce tensions to difficult/unusual/underachieving learners
• increase flexibility in teaching
• apply diversity of methods with continued success
• reduce stress, prevent burnout
• regain job satisfaction & increase motivation

With TSA, educators can make sure that their Teaching Style is in line with the learning needs of their students. Key prerequisites for successfully aligning lessons and learning behaviors are LSA Group Profiles, learning style classrooms with informal, comfortable areas, background learning music, and LS learning materials. It is equally important for teachers to know their own Learning Style because learning style preferences often show up in a person's Teaching Style, summed up in this old saying: "The way you learn is the way you teach". But they should accept that the learning styles of their students can be very different from their own one and strive to apply more flexibility.

Structure of the TSA Model

The pyramid model of the TSA consists of similar elements as the LSA pyramid. Social Aspects are integrated into another layer and a new layer has been added: Techniques. With these Lesson/Unit Planning techniques it becomes possible to evaluate teaching methods used by active teachers.

TSA Pyramid Model for Teachers

TSA is a tool for professional self-development for people currently active in teaching professions. Like the Lerning Style Analysis, it is based on a pyramid model and consists of graphs, detailed personal findings and a catalog of actions for self-development.
Of the many educational profiling tools available to educators, only the TSA shows all the style traits of a teacher in the six key areas of the pyramid model:

• Information processing (left-right brain dominance)
• Teaching methods (Senses)
• Teaching practice (Physical)
• Classroom design (Environment)
• Lesson/Unit Planning (Techniques)
• Professional characteristics (Attitudes)

For each graph there is a detailed description of the general and individual results of the person concerned. Based on this, an Action Plan (with numerous suggestions for self-development) can be created for each area in which changes are desired.

Graph 1: Teaching Style

1A. Teaching Methods (Senses):

This diagram describes teaching methods in the field of sensory perception, which are usually very much based on one's own learning style. The results relate to the way in which knowledge is conveyed to students through stimulating their senses. The whole process is divided into the following elements: auditory (listening, discussing, self talk); visual (reading, watching, imagining); tactile (touching/manipulating) and kinesthetic (physical activities/feeling). The results show the use of these methods in class work ranging from traditional (analytic), to flexible (in transition) or individualistic (holistic) overall style.

Graph 1: Teaching Style

1B. Teaching Practice (physical classroom management):

This part of Graph 1 describes personal leadership strategies in the classroom that very often build on individual experiences during one's own school time. They show how teachers manage the physical and social learning strategies with their students. These include social interaction, BrainGym exercises, authority and control, understanding students' urge to move, their need of mouth stimulation (chewing, eating, nibbling, drinking), and awareness of certain times of the day preferences (individual bio-rhythms).

1C. Classroom Design (environment):

Here preferences for sound and music (silence or background noise), light (dim or bright), room temperature (cool or warm), and learning area (formal or informal/comfortable), as influenced by the teacher are shown.

1D. Planning Techniques (lesson preparation):

The results in this chart describe how educators plan their lessons or teaching units. They highlight the following aspects:

Does the planning include tasks for individual students, for small groups and/or for the whole class? Does the planning provide for defined structures or are students free to structure their own learning? Is the preparation more focused on curriculum content, or are methods used to allow a free-flowing learning process and to work with individual students ?

Graph 2: Left-Right Brain Dominance

The categories in this graph are divided into three groups: A high score in each of these groups indicates the preference for a particular style of thinking (reflective - spontaneous), a mental technique (sequential - simultaneous) and a general tendency (analytic - holistic) used in classroom work.

Graph 2: Left-Right Brain Dominance

High results in both the left and right hemisphere (80% and higher) indicate that the person has achieved high integration and equally uses both hemispheres.

Graph 3: Professional Characteristics

These are divided into the following areas:
motivation, persistence, conformity, responsibility, creativity, diversity awareness, classroom routines and the need for change/variety. Low, flexible or high attitudes are often dependent on the situation and/or the respective interest in a work task.

Graph 3: Professional Characteristics

Graph 4: Success Rate with Students

Graph 4: Success Rate with Students

To present the results more clearly, the different types of students are listed in descending order. If a result is in the range of 80% or higher, then this success rate is among the highest; however, a 0% result simply means that the teacher is currently not working with this type of student.

Personal Report & Guidelines

The core information of the TSA can be found in the Personal Report which gives interpretations of Graphs 1 - 4 and derived from these teachers find Guidelines for individual Professional Development.  

Personal Report & Guidelines (excerpt)

Self-Enhancement Action Plan

Self Enhancement Action Plan (excerpt)

For each Graph there is a detailed description of the individual personal results. Based on this, an Action Plan for self-development can be created for each area in which changes are desired.

In order to successfully implement an Action Plan, it is advisable to transfer it to the Monitoring System and systematically carry out the selected actions as recommended in the TSA Report - through systematic repetition. This is the only way the desired change in professional behaviour can be achieved and sustained.

Personal Monitoring System

The Monitoring System at the end helps to keep track of selected strategies in class and everyday life so that you can see what progress you are making and where you need to improve.

Personal Monitoring System (excerpt)

The Learning Style of a person has a decisive influence on their Teaching Style and in general, educators teach in the same way as they take information in. The insights gained from the TSA can be entered into the Action Plan, which is part of this tool, so that the person can develop their flexibilities. The goal is to use new teaching strategies to reach those students who have a fundamentally different learning style.

Each teacher has his/her own style in using personal teaching methods. The key to getting the most out of a lesson in the classroom is to discover style preferences and use them for preparation, classroom instruction, and successful student management - always matching students' learning style needs.

This instrument enhances the power to educate by showing how a teacher delivers the curriculum content and manages students in class. Of all the many educational profiling tools available, only TSA reveals all a teacher's style features across these six key areas: Sensory Teaching Methods, Classroom Management, Classroom Design, Lesson Planning Techniques, Information Processing - Brain Dominance, and Professional Characteristics.

The Personal Report gives practical advice, and the Action Plan together with the Monitoring System supports a successful implementation of desired changes.

Special Features: It's a professional assessment instrument for educators like no other! It enables teachers to capitalize on their strengths, guides them to performance improvement and gives clear insights into mismatches between own teaching strategies and students’ learning style needs. In pointing out combinations of style elements it even reveals possible reasons for stress and burn-out in teaching. Indispensable for career planning, taking up a new teaching position, wishing to improve one’s communication in class or getting on with difficult students. 

Languages: Available in English, German, Turkish.