By Petulia Clarke, Staff Reporter DELTA, A revolutionary learning system that couples teaching style with personality traits, is being adopted in schools and is making waves in education, at least one principal has said.
Administered by Profitable Corporate Solutions (PCS), the Delta Learning System stresses the importance that learning style, personality traits and multiple intelligences play in effective learning.
When used in schools, all students are taught according to their own unique profile even in a group environment.
The eight-year-old company, which, among other things, fits persons into jobs based on their personality, started out of the realisation that the biggest problems in organisations are with productivity and the failure to match the right personality with the right job.
"We started with the aim of finding some way of helping organisations and students coming out of school," Delta's CEO, Linton Smith, said. "We tried to fix the problem in companies but realised we have to fix it in schools too.
"We realised that sometimes by the time students graduate it's too late to stream them in the job market, so we started a free outreach programme with career talks in schools."
This idea later evolved into Delta which the company starts by looking at self-esteem and does learning style evaluations to help students learn at their optimal levels. PCS aids student development by working with schools, the Ministry of Education and the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ). The company currently works with eight traditional and upgraded high schools.
"There's no current local data to tell what percentage of students are what kind of learners and teachers are not teaching catering to these styles," Mr. Smith said. "We do presentations to parents and do three assessments and three sets of reports to the school. We do one-on-one sessions with the parents on what they must do at home and based on what is needed we can put in self-esteem workshops. We even do sample reports on the teachers and principals, too."
The objective is to get out of the "teacher-stands-in-front-of-the-chalkboard and-hopes-everyone-gets-it" mould, and move to identifying a child's strongest area and working with that.
"Ideally, what we want is for all kids to learn by every method," Mr. Smith said. "What the assessment does is identify their strongest areas (whether they learn best through using their hands, visual or audio) and since we have been along huge successes have been recorded."
Successes include those at Holy Childhood High School in St. Andrew, where principal, Sister James Marie, says that she's seen remarkable results in using the learning style test for the second year there.
"We try to see what area they need help in because we realise that children learn in different ways," Sister James Marie said. "Some are visual, some audio and some use their hands. We assess them and the teachers are taught on how to teach towards a particular learning style."
Students are grouped accordingly.
"It has worked very well here," Sister James Marie said. "When you look at the literacy and numeracy results they are very good, we do it in conjunction with a reading programme: we try everything to make the child learn."
Delta is a local programme and follows on research done by Dr. Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist of Harvard University in the United States whose theory of multiple intelligences, ideas, and interests centre on the development of creativity in children and adults. He holds that humans have a family of intelligences that can be divided into object-related intelligence which includes mathematics and logic; object-free intelligence, including music and language; and personal intelligence, or the psychological perception we have of ourselves and others. The problem is that the education system is not prepared to address the needs of all the intelligences, thus neglecting to address the development of some of these areas.
Delta caters to everyone from early childhood to adulthood with the main focus on five to 19-year-olds.
Appointments are made, assessments done at home, school or at the Delta centre in New Kingston. The results are explained in detail and learning strategies agreed between parents, teachers and Delta. Programmes for continuous improvement, including self esteem workshops, can also be implemented.
Mr. Smith hopes that in time the system will lead to improvements at the CXC levels and in overall morale at the workplace through proper career choices.
The system supports authentic teaching that promotes high quality learning, teaching that requires students to think, develop in-depth understanding and apply academic learning to realistic problems. With the Delta system students are treated as individuals, they are active learners instead of passive participants.
Directors at PCS include Dr. Orville Taylor, a trained sociologist and lecturer at the University of the West Indies (UWI); Mr. Smith who has over 20 years' experience in management; Tricia Spence, a broadcaster and assistant lecturer at UWI; Collin Greenland, a career internal auditor and Melvin Smith and Clive Savage with human resource and accounting experience.
