Thursday, September 22, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
My Learning Style?
I have often heard people say things such as "I learn through doing things" or "I'm a visual learner..." or some similar item. Frequently I am a little hesitant to buy too deeply into what people say when they fail to learn something. There are many reasons why we fail to learn things and some of them include:
I should be quick to add that I typically don't fault the instructors for poorly designed material. There are principles and guidelines that guide the creation and delivery of good instruction, but the fields that explore educational theory often have the following characteristics:
So at the end of the day I suppose I do have a learning style. Listening, reading, and talking about things seems to be a pretty effective.
- The learner is not adapt to that particular media or instructional method (so yes they can have a different learning style)
- The instruction has been poorly constructed and delivered
- The student does not have the proper pre-requisites to understand the new material (trying to teach calculus before someone knows algebra)
- The media and instructional methods do not lend themselves well to the content (teaching visual art with just words)
- A variety of other reasons...
I should be quick to add that I typically don't fault the instructors for poorly designed material. There are principles and guidelines that guide the creation and delivery of good instruction, but the fields that explore educational theory often have the following characteristics:
- Large/verbose (Typical of any academic field but it does not lend itself well to teachers just trying to teach better. Lets be honest people have a limited amount of time.)
- Rather disorganized (Just consider all the different fields educational research publish in)
- Repetitive (Just consider inquiry based instruction vs question based learning. Yes some theories have a fair amount of similar content making things a bit repetitive at times.)
- Not always obvious what the practical implications are for many theories
- Listen to the material
- Read the material
- Talk about it
- Repeat steps 1-4 again
So at the end of the day I suppose I do have a learning style. Listening, reading, and talking about things seems to be a pretty effective.
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