Understanding your current learning styles can help you improve your learning performance. Expanding your learning styles helps even more. You can expand your learning styles by strengthening your dominant styles and using more of your secondary styles.
The Memletic Style graphs below show these two ideas. The first one shows expanding dominant styles, the second shows expanding secondary styles.
Expanding your styles helps learning because it supports strong neural networks that are already there, as well as extends networks that you don’t use often. By doing both, you increase the range of styles you can apply to your content. You can use a style that’s most suitable at the time. You may use a technique that’s powerful for one particular style, or simply involve more of the senses when using another technique.
You improve your learning and retention by using styles you don’t often use. If you are a mainly visual person, you can make a lesson more memorable by injecting some aural content into your visualizations. If you like to work things out logically, occasionally using some physical learning techniques adds variation to your learning. A visualization that involves sight, sounds, movement, sensations and logic is more powerful than a visualization involving sight alone. All these aid learning.
You might think your learning styles don’t change. “That’s who you are.” That’s not true—you can alter and improve your learning styles. For example, when many of us were younger, we preferred a physical learning style. As we grew older, many of us changed to prefer a visual learning style. Our learning styles change and adapt over time.
Your current learning styles are just a neural network that can alter and expand like any other. You can rewire even the strongest neural networks. For example, when a pilot does instrument training (flying in clouds) one of the key behavior changes is to ignore signals from their body. These signals, such as the sense of balance, try to signal the body’s orientation and movement in space. They are often unreliable while flying. The pilot has to learn to ignore those senses and only use the instruments on the control panel. The neural networks that form part of the sense of balance are deeply inbuilt, and yet we can still alter them through training. Your preferred learning styles are no different.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing you are a one style person. Some learning systems try to label people with a particular style, and then radically change the learning curriculum to meet the needs of that style. The studies on these systems have not been encouraging. I suggest you accept the brain’s appetite for diversity and make the most of all the styles.
Lastly, don’t consider these descriptions or scores to be limits. These are just the start. If you can improve your score in a few styles, then you increase your ability to learn. What I haven’t told you is a score of twenty is just a starting point—you can go much further. With the power of the brain, there may also be learning styles we haven’t discovered yet!
Let’s look at some specific ways you can make the most of these learning styles, by strengthening your dominant styles and expanding your secondary styles.
Look at your questionnaire results. In which styles did you score well? These are your dominant styles. Work to understand which parts of your dominant styles you don’t use that often. Read the descriptions of your dominant styles. Use your answers to the questions for each of your dominant styles. The questions for which you scored zero or one could show you ways to build on your dominant styles.
For example:
· If you use a visual style, but have never tried mind mapping, read about the technique and give it a go.
· If you use a verbal style, but have never tried verbalizing your thoughts aloud, try doing so next time you are working through an idea or issue.
· If you prefer a physical style but haven’t done much role-playing or drama, try it next time you want to get another person’s perspective.
· If you prefer the logical style, but haven’t tried to analyze you how solve problems, write some points on the steps you follow. Compare your approach to other problem solving strategies.
Look at some of the techniques other people with similar styles use, and try them out yourself. It’s like the websites that say, “People who bought this book also bought these other books…” You may find that some techniques may not work well for you, perhaps because of a stronger conflicting style. When you find ones that do, you then have a stronger arsenal of techniques that match your already strong learning styles.
Go back and look at your lower scores in the learning style questionnaire. You can expand your range of learning techniques by using more of the styles you don’t use often. Again, go back through the questions, the style descriptions above, and the techniques themselves. Look for ways you can further develop your secondary styles. For example:
· If you use a visual style, try verbalizing your thoughts aloud next time you work through an issue.
· If your preference is an aural style, think more about how you approach and solve a problem. Write down a few notes.
· If your preference is to use a physical style, try mind mapping on big pieces of paper using oversize pens or markers.
· If your preference is a logical or solitary style, try some role-playing or drama—especially with some other people!
You can go further and create a model of someone, real or visualized, who mostly uses one particular learning style. Try using more of the phrases the other styles use. Practice them. Say them aloud. Try doing visualizations and associations using the style of your model. Try to experience the world through their style for a while.