Learning Styles

Have you ever attended a course and felt like other delegates understood it better than you? This may not have anything to do with your ability to learn but probably has a lot more to do with the way you learn. I struggled for a long time when I first started attending work related courses, I knew it wasn’t because I couldn’t understand the subject but for some reason I always left a course feeling like I could have grasped it better – after a while I began to think that maybe it was my fault after all.

After deciding to have a career change to IT Training I attended my first course to gain my training qualifications and discovered learning styles. Suddenly it all made sense and to my relief I realised it wasn’t me at all.

If you’re looking on the Web you may see different terminology mentioned regarding Learning Styles but they all pretty much cover the same basic methods. In this blog I’m going to talk about the Honey & Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire, this was the very first way of identifying learning styles that I came across when I attended my first Delivery Skills training session. In short Honey & Mumford developed a questionnaire based on a group of learning styles identified by David Kolb. This questionnaire takes around 15 minutes to complete and is used to identify a person’s current learning style. This questionnaire is not exhaustive and it’s a good idea to repeat it regularly as you may find that as you change so does your learning style – I know mine has over the years (a couple of times at least)!!

Activists -                  these are hands on learners who prefer to learn by having a go and learning through trial and error.

Reflectors -              tell me learners who like to be fully briefed before proceeding

Theorists -                convince me learners who want reassurance that a project or system makes sense

Pragmatists -           show me learners who want a demonstration from an acknowledged expert

A good training session should ideally cater for all 4 styles of learning and a good trainer should always bear these methods in mind when delivering training.

If you want to know what your learning style is try the questionnaire out for yourself – you may be surprised at what you find out. You can probably find a copy of the questionnaire online (or some variation of it – there are many!).