Learning Styles

Everyone learns differently.  I had never completed a learning styles test before doing this one and i found some of the results quite interesting.  The Felder and Soloman learning styles test helped me realize where my strengths lie when it comes to learning and thus, when it comes to teaching.  Ones own learning style does influence the way they teach as when someone is teaching it is quite easy to fall into the trap of teaching in the style that you learn best yourself rather than identifying the way in which your learner learns.  

From the results above I could identify the following about my learning style:

I am a moderately high active learner.  This means that I learn well when I am doing.  Hand on activities are great as I like to 'get in there' and 'try things out'.  This result was expected as I know one of my weaknesses when it comes to learning new things is that I am not reflective.  I need to try to improve this by studying in groups where others ask questions that makes me think deeper about the task at hand.

When it comes to the Sensing / Intuitive section I sit right in the middle.  From reading the explanation of the learning styles I found that this is actually a good place to be because if you are too intuitive a learner may miss important facts  / procedures but if you are too far on the sensing side then you may rely too much on previous experiences or memorization and not be able to think innovatively. 

I am a highly visual learner and this was not surprising at all.  For the last 8 years I have worked as a building designer for many different Architects, Interior designers and building designers here and in the UK.  I have a passion for design of all types and at the moment my fantastic fiancé and I are designing all of our wedding invitations, decorations, cake and even the jewellery for our big day.  Being a visual learner I find that I learn the best by seeing illustrated instructions for tasks, data presented in graphs rather than tables and diagram rather than trying to extract facts from written texts. 

I found myself lying right in the middle of being a sequential or global learner.  I feel that this is pretty spot on as there are times that I need to learn in a logical order to fully understand a  task but then there are other times that I have found that I think I know the general idea but I t takes a while for me to 'get' the  finer details.  

I found this a great help to assist in my future as a teacher.  By understanding learning styles I will be able to better structure my lessons so that learners of all different styles can benefit from what I teach.  Although it will be difficult creating a lesson with the right balance of written, spoken, and 'hands-on' tasks involved I think that a balance between these different learning styles throughout the course of a day or the week will benefit learners greatly. 

In the classroom I feel that webquests are a great way for students of all different learning styles to engage and learn a lot of new information.  This is because a properly designed/created webquest could include videos and pictures for visual learners, written sections for people that prefer facts from a text and also can include things like a 'Voki' which will 'tell' them the facts.  Links can also be made to resources outside of the actual webquest for learners who wish to develop a greater understanding of the task at hand.

Overall I feel that, having identified my own learning style, I will be able to be a better teacher as it will help me understand that nobody learns the same way that I do and I will have to create lessons that suit my learners, not myself.