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FIVE TYPES OF LEARNING by Carole  Bogue

FIVE TYPES OF LEARNING

Timeless Wisdom and Recent Research

by Carole Bogue

Pub Date: March 25th, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4133-4
Publisher: iUniverse

A brief but comprehensive summary of a pedagogical approach to K-12 classroom education. 

In the 1970s, Bogue (Studying in the Content Areas, 1993) studied for a doctorate in education at the University of Colorado-Boulder under the supervision of Dr. Don E. Carline. Carline died in 2011, but the author says that his legacy lives on in the extraordinary impression he made upon his students. She synopsizes the fundamentals of Carline’s pedagogical system in this slim volume, which functions as both an instructional primer for teachers and an admiring homage to a mentor. According to the author, Carline believed that a fully formed pedagogy required deep reflection on how one accumulates information and builds skills. Teachers who learn inefficiently are likely to teach inefficiently, but they can learn from their own classroom experiences; indeed, Carline formed his own views over a lifetime of teaching. He also asserted that teachers learn from scholarly study, and to this end, Bogue provides a considerable bibliography for each section of this book. She divides it into five parts, each corresponding to a different type of learning; these involve sensory experience, memory, motor skills, problem solving, and the emotional formation of character. Each section is further split in two—the first part furnishes a basic overview of the learning type at hand and associated classroom techniques, and the second provides a synopsis of the science involved, addressing such issues as childhood cognitive development. What emerges is a uniquely holistic interpretation of the learning process, as the various types operate codependently: “One should remember…that little knowledge and few skills are gained through only one type of learning,” Bogue writes. The author’s mastery of the academic literature is astounding throughout, and she sums it all up in accessible, nontechnical prose. Along the way, she seamlessly combines the theoretical with the practical; the “application exercises” here—offering specific questions for teachers—should be genuinely helpful. Overall, this is a concise, thoughtful monograph for K-12 educators looking for an exhaustive pedagogical paradigm that includes critical thinking and values formation.

A lucid introduction to an unjustly neglected teaching philosophy.