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Beguiling Learning Styling

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Its kind of funny, I have only surface experience with learning styles. I’ve always thought of myself as a kinesthetic learner, in that I’ve always struggled with reading textbooks to learn. Even articles in grad school have been a challenge, I’ll read a bit but become extremely distracted over a short amount of time. Now, after reading “Learning Styles” and Chapter 6 of “Make It Stick” I think I am a lazy learner. I’m trying to slow down while I read, turn everything else off, and read in a place where I cannot be distracted. It seems to be working.

I was extremely interested to learn about internal locus of control in learning vs. external locus of control. We have three biological children, all boys. When our oldest was in the 4th grade, we gave up on traditional school and put him into Rivendell. He attended Kruse and Linton before that; he was constantly in trouble, performing at a minimal level, hated school. He thrived at Rivendell, which teaches with a Montessori/problem-based learning approach. I don’t think it had anything to do with visual vs. auditory vs. kinesthetic learning, I think once he had control over his learning, he started to like to learn. Some kids need more structure, ours needed to create their own structure. The same was true with our younger two boys; they did their entire Pre-K-5 grade experience at Rivendell, the middle one went straight to Polaris where he stayed through graduation. He was a mediocre middle school student, but something clicked with him as a freshman in high school. He started caring about his education and since his first semester as a sophomore in high school he has been a straight A student (he’s now a sophomore at CSU in computer engineering). Our youngest followed in his shoes somewhat, he spent a semester at a traditional public school and hated it. He is graduating from Polaris this spring with a 3.92 GPA, and has gotten through college level differential equations during high school. I don’t think our kids are any smarter than other kids; I think they excelled in an environment in which they were in charge of their education. I don’t think that is true of all kids, some seem to thrive in a lot of structure and struggle without it. Some people thrive in organization and some thrive in chaos. The same must be true of learning styles…

Comments

  1. Michelle BiglerApril 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM

    So cool to hear about your son's success in school when he was empowered to direct their own learning. I started my teaching career in an alternative high school and love the community of learners culture!

    ReplyDelete

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