Raising Smarter Children

Learning styles – how could they possibly affect everything?

Well, know it or not, they do, because your actions, behavior, conversations, schoolwork, and everything else you do involves your personal learning style.

Are you frustrated in conversations with your kids or spouse?  How about with a co-worker?  Then you simply have two different types of learning styles, and that frustration is easily fixed, once you know what a learning style is and how it affects you and other people as well.

Let’s say that one of your kids has a really messy room and the other keeps their room spotless.

You too, keep your room spotless.

Here’s the rub.  When you talk to your child who has the messy room, you use your “visual” learning style words to talk to your “kinesthetic” learning style kid.

Visual learners think in pictures, use picture words and when they read, they turn everything into pictures.

Kinesthetic learners are tactile, love to move around, feel things, and don’t even have pictures in their mind usually.

So, when you say, “Clean up that messy room”, they don’t know what you mean – literally.

If your kinesthetic child doesn’t make pictures in their mind, it follows they don’t have any concept of what messy and neat mean.

So, here’s a quick tip about learning styles and the next couple of posts will share a few more:  Learn to speak the learning style language of your kids, who may have a different learning style than you do.

The same goes for your spouse – you may be having little or even big fights all the time, simply because your words are like a camera — look, see, etc., and your kids or spouse use words like “feel”, touch, move, grip, etc., with absolutely no “camera” words in their vocabulary.

Take a moment and think about this – learning styles, visual, auditory and kinesthetic do affect everything you, what you do, what you say, how you act, and the same applies to everyone else too. 

It’s usually the visual learners who perform best in school because their style matches written tests, recalling information in pictures to write the words faster, etc.

The kinesthetic kids are great athletes for example and very gifted in their own way, but we’ve failed them in school, because they can’t show what they know on those darn written tests.  They know how they feel about things, but often don’t translate that into written words fast enough to recall and perform well on the test.

So, for now – just remember that your child, spouse or co-worker may have another learning style than you do. 

If you find that you just can’t talk well together, or do things so differently that it’s annoying you, remembering that everyone has their own personal learning style often helps.  Then just try and figure out the words they use during conversation – are they camera words, feeling words, or do they talk alot, and remember something you said six months ago- that’s an auditory learner who learns by listening.

No need for daily conflict once everyone gets this learning style thing – because there are so many ways to tell who has what learning style and then how to get along with their style.

Today, go to http://www.howtolearn.com and take that Personal Learning Styles Inventory at the top left of the page.  Have your whole family do it too, and read it aloud to your kids just in case they have a reading problem you don’t know about.

Have your co-workers take it.  Some of the biggest coprorations in the world are using this Personal Leanring Style Inventory; so are school districts and thousands of individuals. 

Note the results just in your own family – and a few more learning style tips will show up in the next couple of posts.

Remember – every child and every person is smart – in their own individual way – give them credit for their talents, even if they aren’t the same as yours, and you’ll be a lot happier. Those learning styles do affect absolutely everything you, your family and your co-workers do.

Warmly,

Pat Wyman and Erin Mavredakis, M.D.

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