Learning Styles

People learn in different ways, and how they learn is called their learning style. There are a number of ways in which learning styles can be identified, and there are different categories depending on who you read about.

An individual's learning style is very useful to know about, because then you can adopt your coaching or teaching to fit the student's way of working. For example, someone who has strong visual perception might not be good at receiving verbal instruction. They're better off with a diagram.

In the Dojo you can improve the way a student learns if you understand learning styles.

A Visual student will learn quicker by watching a demonstration of a technique.
An auditory student will be more responsive to the details you talk about.
A kinaesthetic student works on feel, so they might pick up something better if you use them as uke or if you guide them through a technique using touch.

Interestingly, in the Chinese martial arts in particular touch is an important training skill for fine-tuning a student's posture. Push hands training is also very hands-on.

There are other ways of using learning styles. Are you active or reflective, for instance? An active person would rather get on with it and analyse things later; while a reflective students prefers to mull things over first.

A logical or sequential learner likes to follow a step-by-step approach, while an intuitive or global learner prefers to see an overview of the whole picture and learning it in smaller chunks. They may appear to flit around randomly, but their approach is more like completing a jigsaw puzzle than following a recipe.

It's worth getting into learning styles. There are plenty of online questionnaires and quizzes you can try to determine how you learn. Useful for both students and instructors. Here's a few links to get you started:

http://www.businessballs.com/kolblearningstyles.htm
http://www.businessballs.com/vaklearningstylestest.htm
http://www.learning-styles-online.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

I did some learning style work as part of my management qualification at work. My sensory learning style is quite balanced with a slight bias towards Visual. In another test I was strongly intuitive/global learning style - the complete opposite of my visual-logical team members!!

It'll be interesting to apply some of these ideas into the Karate classes and I encourage my students to have a go at one or two quizzes.