1. ON-LINE TOPIC LEARNING STYLES PREPARING TO TEACH IN THE LIFELONG LEARNING SECTOR (PTLLS)

2. HOW DO YOU LIKE TO LEARN? Spend a few minutes thinking about how you learn best. Do you like someone to explain everything to you? Do you prefer to be left alone to read instructions? Do you just like to start and try things until something works? We all prefer to learn in different ways and your learners won’t be any different. We can use the different ways we learn to identify our own preferred learning style. Now go to the College intranet site. In the right hand side under the heading ‘Students’ you will be able to click on a title ‘Learning Styles’. This will take you to an on-line Learning Styles questionnaire which you should complete and then print off the results. Your tutor will ask you which style has been identified as your own preferred learning style.

3. THE LEARNING STYLES Research by Peter Honey & Alan Mumford suggests that there are four learning styles – pragmatists, activists, theorists & reflectors – but often this is narrowed down to three major types – visual learners, auditory learners & kinaesthetic learners. http://www.businessballs.com/vaklearningstylestest.htm - information on learning styles + link to free learning styles test you could use with your learners http://www.vark-learn.com/english/index.asp - a guide to VARK learning styles http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd/pgrd/resources/teaching/theo ries/honey-mumford http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ssds/sd/pgrd/resources/teaching/theo ries/honey-mumford - more about Honey & Mumford

4. VISUAL LEARNERS … … are often meticulous & neat in their work … can find it difficult to follow verbal only instructions … tend to be observers rather than talkers or immediate participants … often find use of colour helpful … can learn well from ‘visual’ explanations using video/DVD.

5. AUDITORY LEARNERS … … enjoy talking & listening to others … respond well to verbal instructions … may have difficulty following written instructions.. often work best if they can hum/sing/talk whilst they are working, but … may be easily distracted by a noisy environment or background music

6. KINAESTHETIC LEARNERS … … often do not like reading and are poor at spelling … may fidget with pens and other items whilst studying … like practical, ‘hands-on’ activities … often use their hands while they are talking

7. POINTS TO CONSIDER Most learners don’t fall neatly into one style, they are generally multi-modal. Many learners who have had poor prior learning experiences at school are predominantly kinaesthetic learners who have not succeeded with a the more auditory methods employed in the past by schools. We should be wary of pigeon-holing our learners into one style and assuming that they can’t learn by other methods To be able to succeed and progress in their learning, we need to encourage and support our learners to widen their learning styles so they can take advantage of all teaching.

8. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Research has shown that we retain ….. 10% of what we read 20% of what we hear 30% of what we see 50% of what we see & hear 70% of what we say 90% of what we say as we do (Pike, (1989), quoted in Gravells, A., (2011), Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector, Learning Matters.)

9. SUPPORTING OUR LEARNERS As we can see from the previous research, for our learners to be able to retain the maximum amount of information, it is important that we help then to widen their learning styles. Spend a few minutes now considering the following situations & how you would respond to them: - It is important that your learners keep notes in class to refer back to later. How would you support your visual learners to do this? - Your auditory learners need to carry out a number of practical tasks. How would you help them to follow your demonstrations & retain what they need to do? - In your subject (& virtually everyone else’s too!) there is a specialist vocabulary that your learners need to be able to spell. How would you help your kinaesthetic learners to achieve this?

10. PRACTICAL STRATEGIES (1) To help visual learners with tasks such as note-taking you need to introduce them to strategies such as highlighting, bulleting and mind-mapping which will provide them with visual prompts & help them structure note in a way that is accessible to them. If you are not familiar with mind- mapping the site below will give you instructions & the YouTube video shows Tony Buzan, the ‘inventor’ of mind maps talking about how they work http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlabrWv25qQ

11. PRACTICAL STRATEGIES (2) To support your auditory learners in following demonstrations you could provide them with a pro-forma to write down the instructions during the demonstration. To support your kinaesthetic learners to learn specialist spellings you need to consider a practical activity such as dividing words into parts on cards & getting them to match them in the correct order e.g. kin aes thetic

12. RECENT RESEARCH In recent years, Professor Frank Coffield has carried out research into the field of Learning Styles arguing that it is more important to support learners to expand the ways in which they learn, than to label them as having one particular learning style. You can find more about Professor Coffield’s work at: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2153773 http://www.ttrb.ac.uk/ViewArticle.aspx?contentId=11465 And you should also know that some researchers think that learning styles actually don’t exist although we are a long way in education generally from accepting this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk