Equip Tips

Don’t you just love it when you know someone who can take all the information you have and make something useful with it? This is the strength of the Common Sense Learner. He is able to take all the facts gathered so accurately and sequentially by the Analytic Learner and put them to good use.

Some of the characteristics of this learning style include:

• Goal oriented – not just satisfied with facts unless they can test them
• Excel at problem solving “how tos”
• They live in a realistic world and not an “idea” world (concrete thinking vs. abstract)
• They see skills as knowledge rather than facts
• They don’t want to be given answers; they prefer to work out the solution. And here is the key, they want to be active and involved with discovering the solution.
• They prefer to work by themselves rather than in groups (very unlike the Imaginative or Dynamic Learners)
• They too do not like lectures! This is true of three of the four learning styles, yet most teachers insist that this is the most effective method. Well, remember next time, that
  

Previously we have covered in brief the four basic ways we process information. Now we will focus on each one. First the Imaginative, or Concrete-Experience, learners.

Each learning style is asking a different question, and unless you as the teacher or preacher understand how to answer that question, you may not reach this learner. (These same learning styles characteristics are true of those sitting in the pews listening to sermons as well. So pastors, listen up.) The Imaginative learner is asking why – why do I need to know this? Convince him or her that what you have to say is important and you will have a willing listener.

Imaginative learners like to talk in broad overview and not details. They see the big picture, but not the tiny dots that compose the picture. They learn by listening and sharing ideas. What scares teachers is that the more they talk the more they learn. This is hard for many of us to grasp, but they need to talk through the information they are processing. They don’t learn well from lectures, which is true of 3 out of these 4 learning styles (sorry those of you who like to speak a lot!).

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These are very social folk who are sociable and sensitive, sometimes too much so. They are willing to help others sometimes even to their own hurt. They are empathetic over against sympathetic.

When they are confronted with truths, they translate it into what they see in people, usually other people.

These learners enjoy interactive activities, and they work best in a noisy environment (sorry teachers).

Win-lose activities don’t work for them as they do not want to see anyone left out or ‘hurt’ by not winning. (These are not the ones you want on your debate team!)

People in this category can be very color sensitive. I can work in a sterile white room, but for them this would be a distraction. If you have ever studied the effects color has on people, you know that pastels work best. But be careful not to have too much color as that distracts almost everyone.

Now, how do you reach these folk so that they learn? First of all don’t expect to be the director of information. They want to be actively involved in the learning experience (true of 3 of the 4 groups). If you want them to learn, direct them to finding the right answers you would have otherwise told them yourself. (Remember, the things they hear once, they will forget 90% of in one week. The things they are involved in they can remember as much as 90% over their lifetime! Make your teaching count.)

What is interesting about the question they ask, why, is that it is easy to answer. When you begin any lesson or sermon by motivating them to what to hear more, you’ve got them. This is what we tell preachers in homiletics to make the introduction to the sermon. Let me explain. I have had many students tell me that they did not like history. So, whenever I taught a course that was involved history I had to begin by explaining what difference knowing this information could make in their lives and ministries. Once they understood that, they were now motivated to stay with me for the rest of the course.

Remember, in any class you teach, or any sermon you preach, you can probably expect that 75% of your listeners do not process information the same way you do. The more you understand, and implement, what you now know about these other learning styles, the more effective you will be. This is not ignoring the work of the Holy Spirit, it is understanding how He made us in the first place.

Part 1 of this article introduced the subject of learning styles and described the four basic ways we process new information. Part 2 described the way we perceive new information, concrete or abstract, and the different ways we order that new information, sequential or random. Part 3 will explain the three basic ways we take in new information.

Simply understood, learning modalities are the sensory channels through which we give, receive, or store information. These include visual learners who prefer to take in information by seeing it. Auditory learners must hear the information, and tactile/kinesthetic (T/K) learners need to feel and touch in order to understand.

In any given group of learners, 25-30% will be strongly visual, 25-30% strongly auditory, 15% T/K, and 25-30% mixed. However, young children are almost all T/K, with many changing to visual by school age. Some will again change later to auditory. Keep this in mind depending on what age you teach. Girls more commonly learn by hearing; and boys have a higher tendency to learn through movement, which might explain why boys tend to drop out of Sunday school more often than girls. But, it must also be said that if a student is very interested in a subject, desire will often override their modality or learning deficiency. These same preferences are evident in adult learners. Personally, I am equal in my auditory and visual ability, with almost no T/K.

Auditory Learners: It is commonly understood that people remember only 10% of what they hear once. (Pastors take note.) This percentage is higher for auditory learners, depending on how long they have to listen. Historically it was said that the average adult can pay close attention for a maximum of 20 minutes. Unfortunately, today that time has dropped to 12 minutes. (Are you still listening pastors?) Attention span is improved by using other aids like printed notes, overheads, PowerPoint, etc. These learners learn best in group settings where they can listen and enter into the discussion. If you have ever observed a person moving his lips while reading, it is because he has to hear the words in order to understand them.

Visual Learners: The more visual images given to these learners the more they will remember.

“Albert Einstein was a visual learner. He had a marked disability with auditory learning and the use of language. Yet he had an extraordinary ability to construct complex card houses, use building blocks, and manipulate geometrical diagrams. These skills suggest that he had a specialized mental ability for visual-spatial (space) perception, visual reasoning, and visual memory. If he were evaluated in the traditional way, he would be labeled learning disabled.”[1]

Making great use of visual aids will even help poor readers. In fact, after 55 studies, students always did better on tests when visuals were given.[2]

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Tactile/Kinesthetic: These are the students who suffer the most in a class setting or while trying to listen to a sermon. Tactile means that the student needs to physically touch something to understand it; kinesthetic students need to be physically moving in some way in order to stay with the information being shared. I had a student who used to sit in the back of the class and knit. She never looked up or participated in the discussion, but she did very well on the test. She told me that unless her hands were in motion she could not listen.

There is more and more information becoming available on the internet on learning styles and modalities, and I would encourage you to become as learned as possible about the subject if you want to become a better teacher or preacher. I would also again refer you to Marlene LeFever’s book, Learning Styles, for more help.

On our website, I will post a modality test for you to take here. It is free and will help you understand what are your strengths and weaknesses. This should help you understand how to better work with your students, or even your children, who have a preference different from yours. Do all you can to move out of your comfort zone and use methods that will reach all the learners God has entrusted to your care.

If you are interested in having someone come to your church and do a seminar on learning styles and modalities, see our website, www.pcacep.org, under training/regional trainers.

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[1]Marlene LeFever, Learning Styles (Colorado Springs: D.C. Cook, 1995), p.103.

[2]Ibid.

In order to understand how to teach, learn, or even preach effectively, we must understand how people process information. This is the subject of learning styles. Most teaching and preaching are done according to one’s own learning style. By doing this we miss reaching those who do not learn the same way we do. Did you ever wonder why you were drawn by certain teachers and preachers and not others? It was because they communicated by the same learning style you have.

There are four basic elements to learning that need to be understood. The first two elements deal with perception; the way we take in new information. This is done in either a concrete or abstract way. Concrete learners perceive things by what their senses take in; and if they are heavily concrete, they see little more than what their senses take in. The opposite is true for the abstract learner. This type of learner takes in new information and conceives new ideas from the concrete. For example, I have two sons. The first sees only what is in front of him; he does not understand jokes or puns. When he drives, he sees the sign that says the speed limit is 35; and he will drive 35 mph, no more, no less. The other son sees the same sign and perceives this to mean 35 is the suggested limit. He has the tickets to prove it.

The next part of the process shows how we order new information. Do we put things in sequential order or random order? Most of us know that when we study history we do so from beginning to the present, and we work accordingly. We also know that what happens in history depends on what went before. This is how the sequential learner lines things up. The random learner sees not the sequence as important but the event itself. To this learner, the order is not important, just the event – in any order.

The individual elements are the easiest to understand. Now we put these together and get their combinations. If you get a learner who is abstract random, sometimes called an Imaginative Learner, you get someone who is prone to be very people-oriented, idealistic, learns by talking things through (teachers love that!), dislikes lectures and working alone, and works better in a colorful environment.

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The concrete sequential (analytics) is a detailed person who loves facts. (Just give me a new dictionary and I’m happy.) It doesn’t mean they want to do anything with the facts; they just love to collect them, such as Cliff Claven from Cheers. These are the great debaters who will use these facts to prove you wrong. This is the ONLY category that learns well by lecture! (Preachers take note.) They also love competition and working alone.

Abstract sequentials are common sense people who like to take the facts gathered by the analytics and figure out what they can do with them to put things to work in some useful way. These too do not learn much from lectures. They are goal-oriented, well structured, resent being given answers, and excel in problem solving.

The last category is concrete random. These are the dynamic people who teachers “hate” the most because they want to run the classroom, think outside the box, and are innovators who use a lot of instinct. They demand flexibility. If you give them an assignment, they will ask if there is a way to do it other than the one you required. They might get the assignment done on time but don’t expect it. These people are natural born leaders and great visionaries, but they are not detailed people.

In Part 3, we will begin to develop each of these four learning styles and put together ways to help them learn.

Over the years I have gone to MANY teacher training workshops. What I found interesting is that most of them simply focused on expanding a teacher’s arsenal of methods. After many years of studying the subject of how we learn and process new information, I have discovered that when you lay out all these teaching methods, people will pick those that best fit with their own learning style. This means that we will pick those methods we are comfortable using, but these will not reach as many as three-fourths of our students whose learning style is different from ours.

Learning styles is not a new subject, nor is it a fad. It was first defined in the 1950s. Christians were introduced to it in the early ’70s when Larry Richards taught us to develop our lessons using “Hook, Book, Look, Took.” I’m not sure how much Larry understood the science of learning styles at that time, but he got it just right.

Today it is recognized that the old “IQ” test is grossly inadequate for measuring intelligence. It is accepted that there are at least nine different intelligences that need to be measured.

How we process new information can be comfortably broken down into four categories. Cynthia Tobias calls them by more technical terms: concrete sequential, abstract sequential, abstract random, and concrete random. These can also be called concrete experience, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation, and reflective observation. Marleen LaFever and Bernice McCarthy refer to them more creatively as imaginative, analytic, common sense, and dynamic. Each describes a different way that learners take in new information and decide what to do with it.

If you have more than one child, you know how different they are. One might prefer to do homework while sitting on the floor with the radio blaring, while the other has to sit at a well lit table in complete silence. If you have more than two children there is a good chance that you are already aware of several different learning styles. For example, if you have a child or student who is very imaginative, he or she might like to talk in generalities rather than specifics and prefer to learn while talking. These children are empathetic, and might go so far as to let their grades drop so they can be part of a group. They work best in a noisy setting, and they don’t like to work alone. They also do not like lectures, which is true of three out of the four styles. Even the color scheme of the room can make a difference for them. While each of the learning styles has a list of characteristics, it must be clearly understood that almost no one fits tightly into any one category. Most of us will overlap into at least one other category.

A question I am often asked is: can our learning style change? The answer is no. We learn to adapt ourselves to the learning situation we are in if we want to survive or fit in.

One last point. Learning styles are often confused with modalities. There are three modalities: hearing, seeing, and motion. Each learning style will have those learners who are strong auditory learners, visual, and/or tactile/kinesthetic. These are subcategories of learning styles.