Learning Styles

I was curious about the comment in Smith's book to the effect that a teacher needs to know his or her own learning styles in order to adjust or correct for one's own biases, in order to adapt to the learning styles of others (Smith, 10). I took the VARK test and scored 9/3/12/5. For one thing, this means that I learn much more visually than I had previously thought. This past semester, I worked hard to develop a handful of graphic heuristics to explain some complex web of philosophical concepts. At first, I felt the need for such images to explain things to my students, but the more I tweaked them, the more I realized that I myself rely on visual cues to tie together different ideas. The more I refined the concept maps, the more helpful and available those ideas became for me. I began to wonder whether I had overestimated the degree of my reading comprehension, at least compared to my visual understanding. My personality type (INFP on the Meyers-Briggs) tends to be abstract and disorganized, but lately I've felt an increased internal desire (and not merely external expectation) for the organization and streamlining of ideas, particularly while revising conference papers and class lectures. This shift will be helpful in the future as I begin to structure online courses, which are nothing if not visual and well-organized.

I also took the Felder Inventory, and scored as a Intuitive/Visual/Reflective/Global. Unlike the VARK, these results did not suprise me. I am a “big picture” person, constantly referring specifics back to generalities. This past semester, I tried to develop a habit of referring each new reading and themeback to the curricular arc. At first, this felt helpful, because it helped each new idea to cohere in a larger story and conceptual framework. However, as the class went on, I began to worry that this global tendency was problematic – not only was I over-simplifying differences, but I also wasn't helping students with more sequential learning styles to work carefully through particular ideas in a step-by-step fashion. I was too worried that the new content would clash with what we'd already covered that I became a bit repetitive, and maybe didn't give that day's content a fair shake in its own right. I didn't trust the students not to lose the forest for the trees, but I began to lose the trees for the forest. This also played out in how I've approached OL 101: looking at all the links for Module 1 was overwhelming, so I opened up a slew of them and copied their content into a single document. My wife pointed out how needlessly time-consuming this move was, and I realized that I was satiating my own fear of approacihng specifics without a general structure in place. It's good to know this about my own learning style, so that I can adjust accordingly for the learning styles of my students.