Response to Differentiated Instruction Individual Exploration Assignment

For this assignment I read "Styles of Thinking as a Basis of Differentiated Instruction," an article written by Robert J. Sternberg and Li-fang Zhang and published in the journal Theory Into Practice, 44(3), 245-253.

In the article, Sternberg and Zhang describe how a thinking style is different from a learning style in that a learning style deals with learning while thinking styles are "the styles of which we speak deal with preferred ways of thinking about material." They continue to discuss and distinguish thinking styles for a length of time, bringing in mental governance, scopes and levels to help distinguish thinking styles. Once that is established, they talk about the thinking styles of teachers and how it impacts the way they teach classes, how a teacher's thinking style interacts with his or her students and their thinking styles, etc.

Though the article doesn't discuss it, I think of the idea of Bloom's taxonomy and how questions we develop and ask reach at different levels of thinking and how that affects learning. Sternberg and Zhang do discuss briefly some of the prompts that some people of different thinking styles may ask students, and it seems to me to be fairly segregated between Bloom's taxonomy levels--that is to say, an executive thinker may ask more level 1 questions, while judicial thinker may ask more level 3 or 4 questions, and a legislative thinker will tend to ask the deeper, more analytic level 5 or 6 questions.

Does that mean that teachers with an executive learning style actually teach less because the questions they tend to ask don't require their to think or learn as much? Does it mean that a teacher with a legislative thinking style will be a boon to his or her students?

Ultimately, it comes down to differentiated instruction, something which this article danced around. It is important to recognize our tendencies as teachers and to realize that we have to meet students where they are as individuals to help them learn to their full potentials as students. It would be near impossible to try to understand which thinking style all 180 of your students have in time to adjust how you teach all of the lessons to them individually, so maybe it is just best to leave the thinking style thing in the bag for now and teach to cover all bases effectively.