Dumping Out the Drawers: A Learning Styles Wrap-up

Our greatest moments of enlightenment come in unsuspecting ways.

I cannot stand math, especially Algebra; it gives me anxiety attacks and all my life I have avoided it like the plague. Apparently, one has to have some basic understanding of Algebra to be able to receive a degree. Dang it! So, I have been attending tutoring sessions for the past month at a Sylvan Learning Center. Turns out, I never understood math-ever! Now I am working on problems that include “fractions” and something called “absolutes,” and I actually broke down and cried when the tutor explained them to me and asked me to do some problems to show my learning. Then she said something, which to anyone else would not seem profound, but to me it was an epiphany: “You keep trying to file everything into drawers; you want rules (really? me? Rebel1, wanting rules?!), and that is not what you need. You need understanding. Close the drawers and just understand it.” Wow.

I believe my math epiphany has application to what I have been doing to myself over the past fifteen years in training and development. I have soaked up every “technique” and “method;” I have gone to every certification program that I could afford ever on the lookout for the “one big theory” or idea, which would turn me into Ken Blanchard or Stephen R. Covey overnight. If I could just fill those filing cabinet drawers with enough information then somehow I would have the knowledge to come up with a new idea. I have “Six Sigma’ed” myself to death with the hope I might be able to know enough to make a difference. I understand now that no matter how much I put into those drawers no single-solution exists, and nothing fits neatly into a “rule.” For example, my beliefs about the all-important and necessary learning styles, which for me fell neatly into audio, visual, or kinesthetic drawers, have been turned upside down and the content scattered everywhere.

I believed that to some extent I had to teach to each learning style during the course of each class, but so much more needs to be taken into account! Now that I have really studied learning styles, I realize that the tools most facilitators use may be completely different from the ones that work for me. I also realize that the best part about what we do as training and development guru’s is not black and white, but is still up for negotiation. In reality an array of possibilities exist which I can bring into my classroom in order to understand my students more fully, but I do not have to go to my “filing cabinet” each time that I teach to decide what those will be. What I need to do is take all that I have learned by study and experience and develop my own principles and theories, because there are still so many yet to be discovered. Why limit myself to what is in those drawers?