Chapter 2: What Really Matters in Teaching (The Students)

UBD/DI focuses not only on the idea that a teacher should know their students learning styles, but also what impacts their life outside the classroom and how it affects their learning. Students’ relationships with peers and parents greatly affect their performance in the classroom. Social and economic status as well as gender, race, and previous exposure to learning are all important factors of how students learn. Attending to all of these issues and influences is a difficult task, but the teacher is not expected to create individualized lesson plans for each student to best meet their needs. Teachers are expected to recognize different ways of learning, such as the multiple intelligences and teach to those to meet the needs of all the students. This impacts me greatly as a teacher because I will need to learn to understand what influences my students and rather than teach to each individually or all in a blanket fashion. I must see patterns of difference in the way my students learn and incorporate their learning styles into