People learn in different ways. When we learn we take in information through our senses, so we see things, we hear things, we learn through doing and we mull things over in our mind. The best learning comes when you provide people with training that engages with all these aspects.
Some people tend to prefer one approach over the others, so you might find that one person much prefers to listen, whereas another might really need to see something before they ‘get it’, while yet others need to do practical things, to move, to really understand and remember what they are being presented with.
In NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) these preferences are called being visual, or auditory or kinaesthetic. There is another preference, too, when people are referred to as ‘audio digital’: these people need a strong sense of order or logic before things sink in properly for them.
I am quite a visual person, so I like diagrams, I think in pictures (not everyone does), I use Mind Maps, my written notes are quite visually diverse and sometimes flamboyant. I need that visual input more than, say, listening to something. And I have a great need for logic and order.
This was brought home to me several years ago when I was training in NLP and my wife Lorraine and I were going somewhere fairly local that we had not been to before. We had the SatNav on but hadn’t bothered to attach it to the windscreen; Lorraine had it resting in her lap and she looked at it and told me where to go.
Lorraine prefers the auditory sense so it made sense to her to just call out the instructions to me on this fiddly route; she said that I didn’t need to see the screen. I thought that I didn’t… But I did! I really did! It was excruciating for me to travel without seeing a map of where I was going.
I had to stop the car in the end and look at the SatNav screen so I could *see* where I was. Once I had seen the territory it all made sense and I understood where I needed to go.
I needed to see to understand, whereas Lorraine didn’t have that need.
When I give directions to someone I always want to reach for a scrap of paper so I can show someone; they might respond, though, by saying “just tell me!” My mind will be saying, “it’s much better if I can show you.”
But for them it may not be…
The problem comes because we tend to assume that the way we learn is they way that everybody learns. So if you learn by listening, you might run a course where you spend most of your time talking, and there will be students who are desperate to see something demonstrated, or to see a diagram, or to have an overview of what they day will entail, or to see the logical links between things, or to try something out for themselves, to ‘get their hands dirty’.
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