Thursday, 02 July 2009

• The Way We Learn Things

  I woke up this morning thinking about learning styles.  I don't know why I thought about it, but I guess this is just something you wonder about when you have a B.S. in biochemistry and you have to second guess whether a pH of 14 is acidic or basic.  Or you forget what the Wolf-Kisner reaction is...or how to even spell it.

  
  

  Typically in psychology, learning styles are grouped into visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning.  Visual learning is associated with reading.  Auditory learning is associated with hearing.  And kinesthetic learning is associated with physical movement.  I used to wonder all the time what my best learning style was, so I took a test.  I scored high on auditory and kinesthetic and poor on visual.  I guess it made some sense.  I get really sleepy when I read books, and I really tune into sound.  So after taking the learning test, I bought an expensive recorder to my lectures and recorded them, but my scores didn't change much.  I felt a bit cheated.  If you don't know a lot of teachers don't actually lecture on most of the things that they put on tests.  Schools are pretty biased towards the visual/reading aspect of learning.  

  
  

  So anyway, I was thinking this morning about another learning style that I think is missing among the three.  It's called modeling.  Modeling is when you emulate someone else.  Psychology recognizes this in babies, but I'd argue that adults need to model others too.  The lessons are different in terms of difficulty, but the emulation part is the same.  Babies need to learn from others how to walk and talk, and adults need to learn from others how to walk the walk and talk the talk.  That's why catch phrases like WWJD catch on.  When we want to be like someone, we try to do the things that they do.  And I think that's sorely missing in our education system.  We don't just need teachers who are experts in their field, but we need teachers who can be roles models and mentors.  Most people would say that the quality of a class is correlated strongly to the quality of a teacher, and that's a really relational thing.  On the other hand, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles are sense-based.  So, if I were to categorize my style, I'd say modeling would be my #1.

  
  

  To further develop my case that learning is highly dependent upon relationships, I think about my cousin who's autistic.  He's 6, and he still doesn't speak.  It's hard to teach him because his brain doesn't activate when other people are around.  He doesn't have the same motivation as you and me to want to speak to others.  In order to help him learn how to speak we have to translate a want that he already has (his want for food for example), and correlate language with it.  But it's hard because he doesn't have the modeling system built into him.  Seeing him is a lesson to me not to take my ability to model after others for granted. 

  
  

  
  

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