Linking Learning Styles and Teaching Styles

Abstract

Most European countries attempt to develop policies to increase the quality of teachers and teacher educators at national and European level. ? Zogla comments on these developments by declaring 'among many complex changes taking place in European society, three major trends are pointed out: the internationalisation of the processes, the impact of the first appearances of the information society and the growing impact of scientific and technical development.' Implying that teacher educators could be the agents of these reforms and changes, she states that 'teacher educators comprise the most important group of specialists in the complicated sets of reform in education' ( ? Zogla, 2006, p. 1). The importance of teacher educators is also outlined by Reimers and Reimers, who stated that 'the role of teacher educators is crucial in understanding and promoting effective programmes for the professional development of teachers, as they are the first to introduce prospective students to the profession, and also the ones who support teachers in their development from novice to experts' (Reimers & Reimers, 2000, pp. 66-67). Teacher educators' education and proficiency level seem to have a significant impact on the quality of student teacher education. This chapter examines how to achieve a better match between students' learning styles and the teaching styles of teacher educators. It is widely accepted that the concept of learning styles is important in teacher education and coping with variouslearning styles of student teachers can be perceived as a major and difficult task for teacher educators. Teacher educators have a double responsibility as they have to relate their own teaching style to that of their student teachers and teach student teachers to adapt to the learning styles of their future pupils. There is little research on the relation between the learning styles of student teachers and the teaching of teacher educator, let alone about teacher educators as role models who show student teachers that it is possible and crucial to adapt to the learning styles of pupils. In this chapter, we describe our own research about learning and teaching styles in Serbia and Turkey. The chapter starts with a discussion on learning and teaching styles in which we draw from insights from relevant literature, in particular from research of our own parts of the world. To illustrate ways to examine the learning and teaching styles, we present two studies-a study about the individual learning styles of students of the Faculty of Education in Sombor, Serbia, and a study into the preferred teaching styles of student teachers of the Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey. The chapter concludes with comments and recommendations about ways to link learning and teaching styles to improve the learning of student teachers.