I was teaching my current Train the Trainer cohort about learning styles. Some people believe in them, others don’t, but I consider them to be important to know about before you can choose to adhere to or disregard them entirely.
One of the theories I teach is Honey and Mumford.
If you’ve not come across them before, briefly Honey and Mumford propose four distinct learning styles:
- Activist – someone who likes to learn by just having a go, jumps into things head first. Probably doesn’t read the manual, just trial and error.
- Theorist – someone who tends to like to read the details. As is in the name, likes theories, concepts and models.
- Pragmatist – someone who needs to apply what they’re learning to a real life situation, or they don’t see the point of it.
- Reflector – someone who likes to observe before they try. As is in the name, they like to reflect and may take longer to complete certain tasks.
Key to note is that they acknowledge that you can have more than one learning style, and that your style may evolve over time or change depending on context.
As I always do when teaching this, I ask students to decide their own learning style(s) and then ask them to guess mine. The idea being that they aren’t supposed to be able to guess mine because I should be teaching for all learning styles.
For the first time ever, I got back “Theorist”. No way, I’m a hardcore Pragmatist with a dash of Activist chucked in. Anything not relevant to what I know, particularly if it involves complicated, academic-sounding names, then I mentally check out.
But I can’t stop thinking about what they said, and I think they were right. I am a theorist, but only in one area: learning pedagogy. Which to me, just solidifies that I am doing the things I love the best, enabling others to learn.
