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The way we learn...

After my Skype conversation with Paula, Joe and Shannon about the next few tasks at hand on the BAPP arts course, one thing really stuck out to me. 

How we learn.

It has always fascinated me how we are all taught together the same subjects in schools from a young age, yet we all learn and consume knowledge in very different ways. I realised from a young age how I learn, which also made it quite difficult for me at school as I was what you call a Kinesthetic learner (I learn from doing), which meant I excelled in practical classes, however not so much with others. Hence, why I love performing arts so much! Don't get me wrong, I still learnt a lot and as soon as I could, I developed my own way of turning not so practical subjects/tasks into more practical ways for me to learn (mainly for homework! sadly I wasn't allowed to start dancing and prancing around classrooms!). 

The '4 Main Learning Styles' are:
  • Visual
  • Auditory
  • Reading/Writing
  • Kinesthetic
According to most, everyone will fall under these categories on how they learn. 
Some people however, do not just come under one category, and these people are called Multi-models. I have found as I have got older I have developed my visual, reading and writing skills more to be able to learn in these ways too. I appear to have slight 'photographic memory' which means I can look at a page and remember it. This isn't always the case but it has helped me expand my ways of learning. Due to hearing problems I have had from a child, aural learning will never really be a strong point of mine! 

So which category would you say you fall under?? 

BUT! And this is a big but, I naively thought it ended there, until Paula mentioned 'Honey & Mumford' learning styles. And I am so glad she did!

Peter Honey and Alan Mumford developed, like above, different learning styles. These to me are the more in depth ways in which people learn. Which have opened my eyes up to even more approaches that I will need to consider when teaching. 

Their 4 Approaches are:
  • Activist - learning by doing.
  • Theorist - understand the theory behind the actions.
  • Pragmatist - see how to put their learning into practice.
  • Reflector - learn by observing and thinking about what happened.
Honey and Mumford believe when you have a better understanding of how you learn you will be able to do the following:

  1. "Become smarter at getting a better fit between learning opportunities and the way you learn best. This makes your learning easier, more effective and more enjoyable. It saves you tackling your learning on a hit-and-miss basis. Equipped with information about your learning preferences, you'll have many more hits and fewer misses."
  2. "Expand the 'band width' of experiences from which you derive benefit. Becoming an all-round learner, increases your versatility and helps you learn from a wide variety of different experiences - some formal, some informal, some planned and some spontaneous."
  3. "Improve your learning skills and processes. Increased awareness of how you learn, opens up the whole process to self-scrutiny and improvement. Learning to learn is your most important capability since it provides the gateway to everything else you want to develop."

They have also created a questionnaire to help you discover where you fit in the different categories. I am going to conduct a little experiment on my blog with you now. I will tell you what I believe I am, and then I will take their questionnaire and see if I know myself completely!
You can find the link to the downloadable questionnaire here (just click the top link):

So here goes, 
I believe after reading through the different styles that I am completely an activist! I love to be thrown into the deep end, and for most of my work I am used to doing this. 
I think I would struggle to fall under the other categories, however to make myself a better learner, being able to use all of these styles would really help me develop myself further as a practitioner. 

I will do the questionnaire tonight and post my results tomorrow.

But for now I would like to share this cycle of Honey and Mumford's learning styles. You can clearly see how they all fit nicely into one another and can really develop your way of learning. Using this as my template, I am going to start writing my journal, and use these key points to plan and reflect on myself and my work. 


I am already starting to learn so much from this next part of the course and I am really enjoying it! I have a sneak suspicion that I will be uploading a fair few blogs about 'The reflective practitioner', so keep an eye out! 

References:

http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/gradschool/training/eresources/teaching/theories/honey-mumford

https://www.le.ac.uk/users/rjm1/etutor/resources/learningtheories/honeymumford.html

https://www.talentlens.co.uk/develop/peter-honey-learning-style-series

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=the+ways+we+learn&rlz=1C1CHNY_enGB703GB703&oq=the+ways+we+learn&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2354j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=honey+and+mumford+learning+styles+questionnaire



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