Are you a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner? Take this 30-second, 5 question quiz to find out. Then scroll down to continue reading.

After you receive your learning type, scroll down for how it impacts you.

A Dangerous Myth

This is going to be really hard to hear, but I promise it’s true. ‘Learning types’ are a myth with absolutely no scientific evidence to support it.

You’re not a visual learner. Or an auditory learner. Or a kinesthetic learner.

You hold this belief because your parents and teachers did.

It’s such a pervasive myth that even though it’s been debunked many times, everything in your body is going to tell you to keep believing it.

Which would be fine, if this particular belief wasn’t so detrimental to your future success, career development, and life fulfillment.

Consider this my attempt to unplug you from The Matrix. Just call me ‘Morpheus’.

Psychological Essentialism

According to the American Psychological Association, “psychological essentialism” is the belief that certain categories of people have a true nature that is biologically based and highly predictive of many factors in their lives.

In other words, it’s the belief that you were born with a particular set of attributes that narrowly bind you to a certain way of being in the world.

Unfortunately, educators of young children are the most likely group of people to both believe in ‘learning styles’ and hold ‘psychological essentialism.’ The result is that teachers and instructors spend enormous time and effort trying to match lessons to each students’ perceived learning styles. Instead, students would benefit from receiving information in multiple ways.

Experience vs Category

Rather than each person having their own learning style, the style in which you learn best depends on the type of content you’re trying to learn. “Visual learners” don’t learn guitar better by looking at diagrams than by playing. Learning guitar is a kinesthetic experience, no matter who is learning it.

Use the learning style most appropriately suited to the task, not the person.

You can read about some of the studies debunking this myth here: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-styles-myth 

Labels can be useful, but also dangerous. 

If teachers and parents have told you all your life that you are a visual learner, you are much less likely to “get your hands dirty.” That means there is an entire set of potential skills you could be learning and activities you could be enjoying, that you wrongly believe you simply cannot learn.

It’s time to unlearn ‘learning styles.’

Some teachers got it right in 2020, while the entire educational system got it wrong

The great Pivot from in-person education to remote learning was a monumental change for parents, students, and teachers.

When the shift first occurred in March of 2020 I was full of optimism. 

“This is it,” I thought. “Finally an excuse to reinvent education for the new world!”

Many of my friends and family members are teachers. I’ve listened to them complain for 15 years about the state of the educational system. They say things like, “It doesn’t serve students or teachers. It’s broken. But what can we do?”

And then educators were given a gift, or so I thought. The entire planet ground to a halt, and with it many of the previously held beliefs about what education should look and feel like were wiped out.

Suddenly teachers had a window into their students true home environments. Students were required to be more responsible for their own learning than ever before.

The educational revolution I’d be waiting for was finally upon us. Things were going to change!

And then… they didn’t.

The very same teachers who had spent a decade bemoaning the failing education system were now begging to go back to that environment, the very environment they believed was not serving students or themselves.

It’s been a year since the first lockdowns, and I think it’s safe to say the industrial system of education will continue. It won.

But why?

Survival of the Busiest

Stefanie Faye Frank is a neuroscience researcher. She specializes in translating complex scientific concepts into language anyone can understand.

I dedicated this entire season of the Beyond Networking podcast to individuals and organizations who’ve made monumental shifts in response to COVID. I invited Stefanie on to discuss how both the educational system and individual teachers have responded to the pandemic.

At one point I asked her, “Why do you think that the educational system is so resistant to change?”

She said:

“I see an analogy between the brain and the education system. The way the brain builds its circuits, it’s use it or lose it, and it’s survival of the busiest.

 

So whatever is the most established is what really gets solidified. And it’s very, very difficult once it is an established network to let it fizzle out.

 

It needs something competing, and it needs a competing circuit to fire so much that the brain then devotes resources naturally to the new circuit.

 

It won’t do it spontaneously or randomly, and it will not do it if it’s just intermittent.”

In Stefanie’s view, education as a system is so established that even COVID motivate sufficient enough change on the individual level to produce a competing circuit.

Teachers should try this

What’s that got to do with learning styles, or the lack thereof?

Stefanie observed what the very best teachers have done during the shift to remote learning:

“A lot of the very resilient, creative educators are involving multiple senses.

 

They have the online environment, but then they have treasure hunts or other activities where the students continuously integrate all their other senses into the classroom.

 

If you can bring in these different senses, you are actually firing up the brain in ways that are very, very powerful for learning.

 

It has more hooks as to what it’s going to remember, because now it’s a body, cellular, visceral memory of whatever the content is.”

Passive consumption is not what the brain is designed to do, she told me.

Whoa. 

Watch or listen to our entire conversation at https://beyondnetworkingpodast.com/stefanie-faye-frank

Next time you’re trying to learn a new skill, or impart a new skill to someone else, remember that the best learning style is the one suited to that particular skill. 

And the more senses you can involve, the more likely it is to stick.