Learning – What’s Your Style?

You may have heard of “learning styles,” sometimes called VARK for Visual, Aural, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic. In over 30 years of my learning and development (L&D) career, I’ve heard countless students tell me they can only learn visually or hands-on. Unfortunately, though, there is a big misunderstanding about what VARK is all about.

The Problem

First of all, VARK is not about how you learn. Learning is far more complex than that. VARK is about mode preference. Some people prefer to see what they are learning. Others prefer to read about the topic. Still others prefer to learn by doing. In reality, most of us use all our senses to learn and we are usually incorrect about how we actually learn.

To clarify, let’s do a thought experiment. How did you learn to tie your shoes? You watched and you tried. How did you learn to speak? You heard and you tried. How did you learn to read? You saw, you heard, and you tried. How did you learn about history? You read and listened to lectures.

A Different Way To Think About Learning

The brain is a very complex collection of neurons. These neurons seek patterns so they can store information in the most energy-efficient way. When we do something and we do it right, the brain is rewarded and develops neuropathways, thus storing the right patterns of how to successfully perform that task – and receive that same reward.

Adult learning is more than choosing a preferred learning mode. As adults, we learn by constructing meaning. Sometimes that meaning comes from reading. Other times it comes from practice or it comes from listening or seeing. What we need first is a reason to learn something. The topic needs to have meaning for us. For example, it needs to be part of our career progression or we want to know more about a vacation destination. Second, we need to associate the new topic with other topics we have already mastered. In our careers, it can be a new area associated with our current profession: A new regulation, a new tool, or a new job skill. Once we have a reason to learn and something to link that back to, we need time to reflect on what we learned and how that fits in with an updated situation. We also need to reflect on how we can retrieve that information. Then we need to practice. Communities of learning and communities of practice can help us to learn and retain what we learn. Within organizations, we learn a lot by doing the work we do and through associating with others in our work communities. Formalized learning takes up a smaller, but important part of how we learn.

Conclusion

When Neil Fleming developed his learning styles model, linking on top of older models, his goal was to explain why kids in the schools where he worked in New Zealand didn’t all learn at the same rates. His ideas were not deeply researched and were not intended to explain how adults learn. The goal was to encourage educators to look at developing curricula in new and flexible ways. Learning is a complex neurological system. Learning preferences may help us enjoy acquiring new information, but will not necessarily lead to better learning. In the end, we do ourselves a disservice if we think we can only learn one way, ignoring the rich experiences that lead to how we really learn.