The million dollar question

Here is the million dollar question and it has taken only 17 years for me to figure out: how do I learn? Well, let me see – I’m most effective when I read and can discuss with examples, I learn well from taking notes. Having to use flashcards is extremely painful! I also don’t do so well by simply talking about concepts. So where does this leave me? Well this week I have defined my learning style!

The week’s reading centered a lot on assessment and how we can understand student learning. A couple ideas that I will touch on include the learner-centered approach to teaching, teaching students to do self-evaluations, and lastly, the one I will mostly focus on, understanding that students learn differently based off of which of the five senses are activated. This last point, understanding how students learn by senses, stood out to me because I want to make sure that I provide a mix of approaches for my students. And, also because I realized I wasn’t 100 percent sure of my style. Understanding my style of learning will help me realize that I may be more prone to teach to my style and neglect the others.

As I was reading in What the best college teachers do, I realized I didn’t necessarily know where I fell into the Sensory Stimulation Theory. The focus from this section was to get to know and understand how your students learn. The book mentioned this theory and my interest was piqued. My first link, from Oxford Brooks University, provided a concise definition of the theory. The best way to summarize it is that effective learning occurs when one of the senses (sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste) are stimulated, and that each person has a predominate sense that they learn best when using. Obviously, most learning will not include the senses of taste or smell unless the student is in a culinary profession or something where these sense are activated.

The second link for this week is from the University of South Dakota (USD) and it is a personal assessment of learning styles and a description of how student’s in each sensory style typically function in a classroom. I think this information is useful to understand why students do what they do in class. I’m not saying it is all encompassing to why some fidget or others want diagrams or visuals, but a start anyway. I have included a link from Three Rivers Community College and it provides suggestions on how to reach students based on the different learning styles. I think these two links work well together because it helps me understand not only how to reach them, but also how they may act in class. This is important I think to a lot of fields, not just communication. I like this idea because it helps me evaluate activities and make sure that I’m providing enough approaches to the material and attempt to reach all learning styles.

To answer the 17 year question – I am a visual learner and I think agree with almost everything that USD says about visual learners. I think it is worth admitting that half of the list I didn’t realize I did.

Point two for the week is the learner-centered approach to teaching and came from, What the best college teachers do. The summary of this approach is to focus on evaluating how the student is learning and not their performance on a particular test or assignment. This philosophy is a way to communicate with students and also examine how students are changing. This philosophy believes that learning is developmental and people undergo changes as they learn. This philosophy focuses on answering the question: what kind of intellectual and personal development do I want my students to enjoy in class? I find this information useful because it reminds me that this is a developmental process. I think it is important to remember that as we learn we change as well. Granted some of the changes we experience as students come from maturing, but a lot come from how our thought processes develop. I like that the focus is on learning and not performance. I like that it describes how we can encourage students to go the extra step, or give a little extra time to those who are tackling more than other class members. I think this encourages students who want to take the assignment to the next level to do so. Recently, I had an instructor offer me extra time for a project I was working on and immediately said I didn’t need it. But I truly did. My impression was that the instructor thought I wasn’t capable of finishing the assignment. I never thought that maybe it was a way to help me successfully meet my goals and continue with my learning. This philosophy and my experience will hopefully help me recognize students who are challenging themselves and allow me to communicate to them that the extra time is because of the complexity of their project and not a reflection of their capabilities. (Not sure if this truly was the route my instructor was going, but could be one explanation.)

My final point for the week that I would like to mention is based on teaching students to do self-assessments. To summarize the concept from our reading, it suggests having students do peer evaluations of each other’s work. The concept is that students will be able to identify and understand the instructor’s expectations. I find this information useful because once students recognize what you expect, they are able to make modifications to how they approach assignments. I have my students do peer evaluations on speeches, and recently had them do evaluations on outlines. I asked students to write down the critiques they received and who they were from. I reviewed the outlines and comments myself and found I agreed with almost all of the comments. I was surprised by the thoroughness and depth of the comments. I would like to implement self-evaluations in my classroom, but I am not sure how I can teach students how to critique themselves. I know that they understand the process of evaluating, but I’m not sure how to approach teaching them how to apply it to a self-evaluation. I think this concept is important, again not just to communication, but to all students and professionals. Having the ability to step back from our work and examine how it can be improved is a helpful quality as a student and a professional. Self evaluation is a way to continually challenging ourselves to become better; to strive for the next level.

My main take-away points from this week’s blog are: understanding the different student learning styles and how my own may influence my teaching style, understanding learner-centered teaching and how we can foster development in our students and finally, how the idea of self-evaluations to improve.

To conclude, my self-evaluation for this week is that I enjoy writing with colorful, vivid language and not a straightforward approach. This was probably the hardest entry for me to write and may be explained by the fact I’m a visual learner. Let's hope my creative side comes back from its hiatus!


Brooks Oxford University
Explanation of sensory learning:

Three Community College
tips for understanding the different styles


University of South Dakota
Assessment tools

information about styles