Over many years of running Train the Trainer courses and coaching facilitators, I’ve spent time talking about learning styles e.g. Honey & Mumford and occasionally Visual, Auditory & Kinasethetic. Whilst I feel like participants have got great learning value from them, I’ve had a growing sense of unease about the robustness of their scientific basis and how much you could validly infer from them. The ELN website highlighted a clip on YouTube which I think that anyone running a Train the Trainer course should watch.
Whatever side of this scientific debate you support, I think that discussing learning styles does make two important practical points for a budding facilitator:
- Not everyone learns the same way that you did, so you primarily need to think about what will work best for your participants not yourself.
- You need to work to gain and maintain learners’ attentions. Avoiding being trapped in one style will enable you to achieve greater variety and hence better learning outcomes.
Apart from a moment of confusing Chad with Algeria, here’s Professor Willingham’s excellent clip. Let me know what you thought about it.
