Learning Styles and E-courses

(To book our Introduction to Learning Styles E-Course, please click on the button below:)

Not everybody is suited to learning optimally through an online course. Kinesthetic learners who enjoy working in a group are better off in a face-to-face interactive workshop.

However, if you have a preference in 4 or more of the following, e-learning is for you:

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  visual (reading)
  
  


• 
  
  visual (watching)
  
  


• 
  
  tactile
  
  


• 
  
  learning alone
  
  


• 
  
  stationary
  
  


• 
  
  internal motivation.
  
  

(To book our Introduction to Learning Styles E-Course, please click on the button below:)

Teaching Styles, Learning Styles and Staff Retention

Think back to the most memorable teacher you’ve ever had, be it your favourite, your least favourite, or the quirkiest one.
· Did they require absolute order and silence in class, or did they stand in the doorway and shout “Hello world!” at the top of their voice? (One of mine did.)
· Did they stick to the textbook or act like the teacher from “Dead poet society”?
· Did they give you the details or the overview?
· Did they march around the room with you pretending to start the French revolution?
· Did they encourage projects such as mini-plays, craft or group work to help put the new concepts across?
· Were the tests that they set up traditional or eccentric?
· Were their classrooms decorated with learning tools and visual prompts?

Every teacher has their unique teaching style: the way in which they explain new and difficult problems. But chances are, the teachers that you love and remember best are the ones who can expand their teaching style beyond the traditional and the expected.

(To analyse your own teaching style and improve your job satisfaction, have a look at this free online demo.)

Many schools find it difficult to employ or retain good teachers. Could it be that teachers find their teaching style mismatched to the school’s expectations? Or are teachers simply disillusioned by the lack of discipline and the hate of learning displayed by the new generation of students?

Most discipline issues can be solved by reaching the students through understanding and appreciation of their unique learning needs. To find out more about the topic, please email info @ clc.co.nz.

Learning Styles and School Discipline

Many otherwise successful countries (USA, Great Britain, New Zealand) are struggling with educating their children. That’s despite access to fabulous resources such as free schooling, the latest computer technologies, free libraries, learning tools and experienced teachers.

Why?

According to teachers who worked both in developing and in developed countries, it’s all a matter of the environment’s attitude to education. People in Korea or Thailand, just to name a few, have a lot of respect for the school system, and teachers are respected as “the other set of parents away from home”. Education is expensive there, with at least a third of the family’s income being swallowed by schooling costs, and children are appropriately mindful not to waste the hard-earned opportunity they are given.

In contrast, children in developed countries often assume it’s their right not only to have a wonderful free school nearby, but also to get educated by osmosis and without the least bit of effort on their part. If they fail, it’s the teachers’ fault for not teaching well, or the parents’ fault for not choosing the right school, or the school’s fault for... the excuses just get more creative. The result is lack of academic progress and slack discipline at school (see the news box about new measures schools are forced to adopt).

It's time we stopped passing the blame. We are blessed and privileged to have brilliant education assets at our disposal, and all we need to do is change our attitude to learning.

Learning should not be a chore.

Learning should be fun!

The human brain wants to learn: it evolved (or was designed, whichever theory you wish to follow) that way. All you need to do, is get the children’s attitude right, their learning environment optimal to their unique learning style needs and learning tools suitable to multi-sensory stimulation. If you look at the elements in the Learning Style Pyramid, you will see that Motivation, Responsibility, Conformity and Persistence are some of the Attitudes that determine a child’s success at school and their individual learning style.

Your child’s learning style is the way
in which they understand
and remember new concepts.

To analyse your child’s learning style, have a look at this free online demo.

Your Learning Style and Learning Facts

What is more important: knowing facts or knowing how to find facts? What competencies and knowledge do our children need to be successful in the 21st century?

New Zealand’s government believes it has the answer in the form of a new curriculum, which “represents a shift away from focusing on knowing facts and figures to knowing also how to use knowledge effectively and apply it outside the classroom."

As an idealistic idea, it’s not a bad one. Why cram your brain with dates and formulae, which you can look up in the textbook or on the Internet? Why memorise concepts you don’t necessarily understand or know how to apply in your decision-making? Intelligence and school success should not be measured with, or equated to, the ability to memorise. Do away with learning by rote and replace it with teaching our children to think, right?

On the other hand, as somebody pointed out to me:

The shift away from learning facts is a bit of a worry. You wouldn't want to be left hanging in the middle of something (like surgery) to wait while the doctor quickly nipped into an Internet chat room to check how to stop your bleeding.

Whether you believe that it’s facts or the global overview that is the most important, is - naturally - dictated by your own unique Learning Style. If you like detailed information, you are most likely an analytic thinker. If, however, you value an overview above all else and consider particulars much less important, you are probably a holistic thinker.

Are you an analytic or a global thinker?
To find out your own or your child’s learning style,
have a look at this free online demo.

Traditionally, schools have been geared towards analytic teaching and learning. New Zealand is trying to move away from that in favour of a less factual education system. If that means accommodating students whose information processing is non-sequential, while at the same time retaining the stimulation for sequentially-thinking students, that can only be a good thing.

Meanwhile, in the latest New Zealand education news, a furious debate broke out over a Level 3 Geography exam question (this equates to Year 13 and University Entrance can be gained by successfully completing NCEA Level 3). Five photographs (of images such as a park to a city's central business district) were shown, and students had to explain how each image could be viewed from a feminist perspective.

Some people consider it a wonderful question that allows students to think outside the square, others see it as an opinion-based non-factual question with a built-in advantage towards girls.

Have your say here. Leave a comment.

Learning Styles and Illiteracy

Globally, illiteracy is becoming one of the most prominent social pains of the 21st century. While in developing countries the problem is chiefly the lack of teachers, schools and teaching aids; the problem in the West is the overabundance of technology.

In a world where television, computers and cell phones reign supreme, books are taking a distant second place. Even SMS or email no longer resembles the written word, with shortcuts and phonics such as: “GTG PAW c u 2nite”.

Of course, struggling to read may have its roots in health issues such as vision problems or dyslexia.

More often than not, however, if a child has access to food, school and books - yet they have not acquired the ability to read, the problem may lie in their Learning Style.


Your child’s learning style dictates the way in which he or she understands and remembers new concepts. The learning style will also determine the way they learn to read.


If your child is not visual, for example, they will have no natural curiosity about books. If they need mobility for their learning, sitting still with a book is an unnatural thing for them to do. If they are not left-brained, the idea of starting the book at one end and continuing in a linear fashion will be foreign and uncomfortable.

You can help!


A tactile child will benefit greatly from being allowed to handle the book and trace the words with their fingers. An externally auditory child will prefer to read the words out loud. And you can keep a kinesthetic child’s interest by asking them to act out the plot of the book as you read it together.

Is your child tactile or kinesthetic?

Of course, as with any new learning, learning to read should take place in an environment that’s tailor-made for that specific child’s learning needs. The Learning style Analysis (LSA) report shows parents exactly how to turn the learning area at home into a successful one.

To find out your child’s learning style, have a look at this free online demo.

Learning Styles and ADD

It is hard for parents to have their child diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder). It’s harder still to make the decision to put them on medication such as Ritalin.

So before you accept somebody’s ADD label as applicable to your unruly and impetuous child, who’s acting up in school and has trouble paying attention, here is a reality check.

· Most healthy children’s attention span is shorter than the sound of their name.
· Most healthy children are impetuous (spontaneous).
· Most healthy children are a handful and will misbehave regularly.

Of course, some children are noisier than others. Some children run around more and listen less. It all has to do with their own unique learning style.

A learning style is the way in which a child understands and remembers new concepts.

If your child needs mobility for learning, he will want to pace the classroom so as to better understand the lesson. An impulsive child will shout out an answer before she hears the end of the question, potentially earning a label of hot-headed or unthinking or attention-deficient. If your child is highly kinesthetic, she will not want to be stuck between the four walls of the classroom.

Moreover, if you child’s learning style is a mismatch with the school’s teaching style, and if he has a history of being misunderstood by the teachers, he may become rebellious and unruly.

Such children are at risk of being misdiagnosed with ADD.

To find out your child’s learning style, have a look at this free online demo.

Learning Styles and Learning Difficulties

• Is your child bored at school?
• Does homework become a daily battlefield?
• Has the teacher ever mentioned that your child tends to be disruptive or undisciplined in class?
• Are your child’s school results a poor reflection on the child’s intelligence and ability?
• Has your child been diagnosed with ADD (ADHD) and you feel uncomfortable with that diagnosis?
• Is your child’s reading level below expectation?
• Is maths difficult?
  
  If you said ‘yes’ to any of the above points, your child may be experiencing a mismatch between her learning style and the way in which the school is teaching the curriculum.
  
  
  Your learning style dictates the way in which you understand and remember new concepts.
  
  Some of the factors that affect your child’s learning style, and therefore her learning success, include:
  * Her need for snacking during the learning process
  * The amount of real or artificial light in the room
  * The presence (or absence) of background noise in the room
  * Your child’s need for adult supervision or for learning in a group
  * Your child’s preferred sense or senses for information intake
  * … and many others.
  
  Ultimately, if your child’s learning style needs are not satisfied, she will experience learning difficulties. She may become unenthusiastic about learning new things, her self-confidence will plunge (she may start to believe she is ‘stupid’ or ‘slow’), her attitude may become rebellious or apathetic.
  
  To find out your child’s learning style, have a look at this free online demo.
  

Learning Styles and Your Career

Calling all Teenagers - Second-Timers Welcome!

Your career choice is one of the most important decisions you will have to make. Whether you are 16 or 46, you want to ensure that the job you’ll be doing for the next few years, 8 hours a day (at least), 5 days a week, is something that you can be passionate about and something that suits your own individual Learning Style or Working Style.

Every person has his or her unique learning style: some of us want visual props like photos and diagrams, others prefer listening to a taped lecture, others still will pace up and down the room in order to understand the new material better.

Similarly, we are also poles apart when it comes to the way we work: some of us tackle one task at a time and keep at it until it’s finished, while others prefer working on several things at the same time.

All these different preferences are called your Learning Style. And the thing is, they can be measured by applying a Learning Style Analysis (LSA).

It’s an online questionnaire and takes about 10 minutes to complete. As soon as you answer the questions, you receive a report with your own personal learning profile.

(You can find a free demo of learning style analysis here.)

So how do you use the information contained in the profile?

It’s really simple. The profile will make recommendations as to which careers may or may not be suitable for you. For example, if you can’t stand routine, your profile will say something like: “As you love change, and enjoy trying out new things, you hardly ever do the same thing the same way twice. It is important that you take into account your strong need for variety and your love of change when you consider future career planning.”

If you’re a talker who needs people interaction, the profile will guide you as follows: “For your future career planning it is very important to consider jobs which require good communication skills and a lot of people involvement.”

Sometimes the profile will list your preferences and let you decide what to do with the information, without suggesting a specific career path. Let’s imagine that your report says: “You have very strong analytical skills when it comes to problem solving or brain storming, and you always tend to use your rational, left-brain style first. When something is neither logical nor proceeding sequentially, you are not really interested.” The report will not state explicitly that you should seek careers that require strong analytic skills.

Your Learning Style Analysis report will not tell you that you should become a lawyer or try to dissuade you from following your dream to be an actor.

What the report will do, however, is list your strengths, your flexibilities and your non-preferences. That knowledge will be priceless when you’re considering your first (or your tenth) career.

(The link to the free learning style analysis demo again: click here.)

Learning Styles and Traditional Schools

Today’s typical classroom may look totally different to the one in which our parents learnt: it may have tables that are big enough for ten children (as opposed to desks for one or two), the seats may be arranged in a circle (as opposed to in rows), and the blackboard may be white.

Some things, however, don’t change. Today’s pupils are still required to rely heavily on their eyes in order to take in information. The information may come from a textbook, a movie, an overhead projector or a demonstration of a science experiment - all of which are highly visual sources.

Similarly, when it comes to checking the child’s knowledge, it is usually done in a visual way: written homework, homework that involves reading or drawing, written tests.

This is why it’s crucial to know your child’s learning style. If they are highly visual, especially if combined with auditory, you can rest easy knowing that the learning material is presented to them in an optimal way. Of course, you still need to make sure that they are motivated and that other elements of their learning style are accommodated (sound, temperature, structure, the level of detail, social needs, and so on)... and you still have to check their eyes regularly to make sure they are up to the learning task.

If your child is not visual, however, they will probably struggle in a traditional school. While of course respecting their unique learning preferences, it’ll be a good idea to teach them some techniques that allow them to cope with the very visual world around us.

Some of the techniques include:
· Encourage your child to look at objects in greater detail: ask them to describe what they see at a first glance and what they see when they look again for a longer period of time.
· Play “spot the difference” puzzles and “Where is Wally”?
· Practice reading paragraphs of text together, then visualising it as a movie.
· Ask them to close their eyes and tell you what colour clothes you’re wearing.
· Do jigsaw puzzles together, particularly those that rely on utilising observation skills.
· Make a game out of watching people in the street, in the café, in the mall.
· At the supermarket, look at the shelves together and count the varieties of cereal, dried fruit and cheese.
· Organise treasure hunts (in the garden or the family room) that rely on observation skills alone. Let the “treasures” stick out or bulge out just a little, and encourage the children to find them with their eyes, not hands.

You can find a free demo of learning style analysis here.

Learning Style + Teaching Style = Perfect Match

A learning style is the child’s preferred way of learning new things.
A teaching style is the teacher’s preferred way of imparting knowledge.

Have you ever wondered why it’s so important that the teacher’s teaching style should match the student’s learning style?

Just consider this recent (actual) news clip from Reuters:
“It's official: Your toddler is smarter than a chimp, at least at some things! In one social learning test, a researcher showed the children and apes how to pop open a plastic tube to get food or a toy contained inside. The children observed and imitated the solution. Chimpanzees and orangutans, however, tried to smash open the tube or yank out the contents with their teeth.”

Now compare the story above to the following (fictional) news clip that could have made headlines somewhere in a science-fiction universe:
“It's official: A chimp toddler is smarter than a human, at least at some things! In one social learning test, a researcher showed the subjects how to smash open a plastic tube containing food or a toy, or to yank out the tube’s contents with their teeth. The chimpanzee toddlers observed and imitated the solutions. The human subjects, however, tried to pop open the tube with their fingers.”

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

To read an article about learning styles, please click here.
To find out more about teaching styles, please have a look here.

A quick disclaimer: the above illustration is not meant to be derogatory to humans, apes, teachers or students in any way whatsoever.

Learning Styles - How Your Child Learns Best

Learning Styles allow you to find out how your child learns best. When it comes to learning about Christopher Columbus, for example, she may find it easiest and most enjoyable to:
· Read a factual book on the subject.
· Read a novel on the subject, with a lot of the contents fictionalised.
· See the movie “1492”.
· Visit a museum exhibition about sea voyages.
· Make a model of the ship.
· Direct, write or star in a play about Columbus.

And that’s not all. When and where and with whom are also important choices when it comes to absorbing new information. Your child might like working alone or with friends, in the morning or the evening, in a quiet or busy spot.

To find out more, please visit Creative Learning and Prashnig Style Solutions and take the tour.

Did you know that...
.... your child's learning style affects more than just her grades?

· It also determines how she plays sport, forms friendships and communicates her emotions.
· It influences what she does for fun in her spare time and how safe she is on the Internet.
· It is a good indicator of whether - as a teenager - she will find it easy to say no to cigarettes, drugs and other dangerous activities.

Re-Train your Brain with Learning Styles

What if... you could influence your environment?
What if... you could think your way into being healthy or happy or successful?
What if... changing your mind could change your destiny?

That’s exactly what Dr Joe Dispenza (from the movie What The Bleep Do We Know!?) is promising in his books and seminars.

Dr Dispenza’s personal story reflects his doctrine. After a serious accident when he was twenty-three years old, he was left with a multiple-fractured vertebrae. he decided against surgery and literally thought his way to a full recovery in just 3 months. Amazed by the power of the human mind, he set out to learn more about the mind-body connection and the potential of the brain.

He discovered that the human brain is neuro-plastic: it can change its synaptic wiring by learning information and b recording experiences. This plasticity allows us to evolve our actions and modify our behaviour so that we are successful. The best way to retain this neuro-plasticity is to learn new things and make new memories, thus causing the brain to fire in new patterns and combinations. To change your mindset, you must make new neurons in your brain by repeating a thought or action over and over again until it becomes so effortless, it’s subliminal.

Now, because your environment is an extension of your mind, postulates Dr Dispenza, it stands to reason that if you change your mindset, you will change your environment.

A very simple manifestation of that is a smile. If you make yourself smile for no reason at all, you will feel happy (you’ve now changed your mindset). Moreover, you will make others smile back at you quite subconsciously, thus making them happier (now you’ve changed your environment). If you were to practice that for eight hours every day, what do you suppose the results would be?

According to Dr Dispenza, to change your fate you should:
1. Believe in a higher power.
2. Stop shifting the blame for your circumstances.
3. Visualise the outcome you desire daily (in other words, in your mind, you practice being the person you want to become).
4. Move out of the way and let the higher power arrange the result.

Of course, some people are better at change than others. Some have natural visualisation skills. Some may even be too goal-oriented to be able to relinquish control to the higher power.

Does your learning style stand in the way of change? To find out, please click here.

Quoted from "What the Bleep"...

"So, if we're consciously designing our destiny, if we're consciously, from a spiritual standpoint, throwing in the idea that our thoughts can affect our reality or affect our life, because reality equals life..., then, I have this little pact that I have when I create my day."

"I say to myself, I'm taking this time to create my day, and I'm infecting the Quantum Field. Now, if it is in fact [infecting my/the energy field], the Observer's watching me the whole time that I'm doing this, and there is a spiritual aspect to myself. Then, show me a sign today, that you paid attention to any one of these things that I created, and bring them in a way that I won't expect."

Learning Style - “Help, my child is impulsive!”

Does your child prefer to give a quick answer rather than a correct answer? Is her mind very quick? Does it constantly create new ideas?

If that’s the case, it’s possible that your child’s learning style is impulsive. She might have difficulties concentrating and staying focused on her schoolwork, she might get easily distracted from doing homework or paying attention to a task for a length of time.

For an impulsive child to thrive at school, she needs an understanding teacher who’s willing to accommodate her thinking style by allowing the child to answer in her preferred quick way and not discouraging her when she gets the answer wrong.

Fast-paced, short and challenging assignments suit an impulsive child’s thinking style best. A method that often works with impulsive children, is to ask them the question upfront and then tell them to find the answer in the textbook or in the classroom display cabinet (as opposed to telling them a lot of facts first and then asking questions about it). Asking one question at a time might also be a good way of keeping the child’s attention focused.

Another way may be to offer small rewards for every correct answer, thus motivating the child to become more flexible in their impulsive thinking style. Note: this will only work with externally motivated children (to find out more about your child’s motivation, please click here).

Either way, because impulsiveness is a biological trait, your child is not likely to change her thinking style very much as she grows older. To enhance her learning success in an environment that does not accept her impulsive style, she needs techniques for coping with being wrong some of the time, or with being labelled somebody who doesn’t think before they speak. You can help her by making her understand that this impulsiveness is simply part of her learning style, and not the person she is.

In any case, in today’s fast-paced society, it’s not always a bad thing to be impulsive. Sometimes a quick decision that’s not perfect may be better than a perfect decision that comes too late.

Did you know?
Impulsive decision-making is just one of 48 elements that make up your child’s learning style. To determine the other elements, analyse your child’s learning style here with our free demo.