Transform Adult Education: Unlock Learning Style Wisdom

Welcome to your presentation on learning, how do people learn, or how to most effectively teach. In this presentation, we're going to learn why it's important to understand learning styles, identify the three components of learning, explore the multiple facets of learning, and then we'll synthesize the components and facets of learning to understand how you most effectively learn and how you can help your clients most effectively learn. So why do we care? This is the first thing you know. Why are we even watching this? You learn every day when you read or watch the news, when you develop a new skill or hobby, or just walking around and observing. You're kind of like a sponge and you're seeing things. You're learning even if you don't know you're learning. In order to change a behavior, you need to learn the function of the old behavior, learn why the old behavior is not meeting your needs, learn about alternate behaviors, and then develop that knowledge into skills. So there's a lot of learning that goes on. In the client partnership model, the client and coach identify learning goals and methods. Together, we help the client brainstorm and figure out what they want to learn or where they want to go, and then we help them identify the specifics about what they still need to learn and how to best accomplish those tasks. In the client partnership model, new information is linked to prior learning. So we're going to take whatever we teach and we're going to compare it to either what worked in the past, or we'll contrast it with what didn't work in the past and talk about why this might be different. The client will also undergo an unlearning process before new information is implemented. So if there's something that they used to do that they want to not do anymore, they're going to sort of have to break that habit or unlearn that behavior and learn a new way of acting and reacting. So if you're working with a client who, for example, has anger management issues, and when in the past, when they got upset, the first thing they would do is put their fist through a wall. We need to have them unlearn that, and we're going to put a different behavior in that place, in that process, they're first going to have to figure out or understand what makes them angry and why they react the way they react. In addition to learning whatever the new skill is, developing it so it's effective. In this model, information is also given over time. We don't just dump stuff on a client in one session and go, okay, you know what you need to know, move on. Great knowing you. We'll present the information. They'll come, they'll practice it for a week. They'll come back in the next week. We'll talk about how it felt, practicing it, what they may need to know more about, what they may need to practice, what they may need to change a little bit. They'll practice again for another week, and they'll bring it back and we'll talk about it again and go, how did it feel this time? Did this help at all? Think about if you're trying to learn golf or tennis. You learn the basic stroke, and then you practice it, and then you go back and you review game tapes, you review practice tapes, you look at what your swing looked like, and you identify what you need to do more of, what you need to do less of, maybe learn a few new techniques in order to improve upon that skill, go out and practice it again, and repeat that scenario until you've mastered it. So information is given over time and tailored to the needs of the individual. Not everything is going to work for everyone. So when the client comes back in and you go, how did that work? And they say, well, let's talk about what worked well. And then let's talk about what didn't work so well, or what felt odd or felt weird or felt hard. And then we'll figure out how to adjust. So the intervention works for the person. And learning is affective, cognitive, social, and behavioral, which means there's an emotional motivation. It makes you feel happy, it makes you feel good, it makes you feel confident. There's a cognitive. You understand the who, what, when, where, and whys of what, whatever it is you're doing. There's a social component. You observe other people doing it. You get reinforcement from other people for doing it. And there's a behavioral component. Usually when we learn something, we're learning to do something new, whether it's to think a new way or to act in a different way. So what are some of our assumptions about learners? Learners want to know why they should learn it. This is their motivation. So before you start trying to launch into a whole bunch of detail about something, help people get motivated to learn about it. Sometimes it's by presenting a problem. Sometimes it's by presenting a story that the person can relate to. Or sometimes it's by asking, you know, presenting what we're going to talk about and having the person define how it will help you succeed. So if we're going to talk about relaxation skills in group today, then I'm Going to have each person tell me how might learning relaxation skills help you in your recovery process? We want them to have a personal stake in it. Most learners are active, responsible and self directed. So we want them to identify what is it that they want to get out of this? How can you apply it to your life? So as we're talking, I want you to keep asking yourself, how can I apply this to what I'm going through right now? And learners bring experience to learning. They have a general idea of most topics that they're in a room for. Whether it's depression, anxiety, addiction, relationship skills, codependency. They have a general idea. So we want to know what they know about it and what their experiences have been. We also want to know what their biases are about it. You know, what are your opinions and attitudes about this particular topic. That way we can address them in the learning process and address them when we're trying to increase motivation. Learners are ready to learn when the need arises. So. So we need to think about how we can make mandatory learning more relevant. My kids are homeschooled and when we go to do math, it's always the same fight. Well, I'm never going to use this. So one of the challenges to me as a homeschooling parent is to constantly bring whatever we're learning in the classroom back to real life. How are fractions useful in real life? How is algebra use useful in real life? And it is useful. It's just a matter of helping people see why it's useful and how it's useful. And how can you increase rewards for learning? Because some things are hard for me. I am not great at math. You know, I know it's useful and it's relevant, but I am not the best at it. So when I do math related things, I try to incorporate extra rewards or make the day a little bit shorter in order to give them credit for staying focused on something that was a little difficult for them, at least for my daughter. My son's great with math. Provide task and problem oriented learning instead of talking about hypotheticals, have people apply it to their life. Identify something they need to learn about in order to improve their recovery or happiness. So what is it that you need to learn about that you want to learn about that we can learn about? The context of learning is also important if you have a positive learning climate. People are going to learn more if people are afraid to ask questions or if it's a. I had a professor one time who had PowerPoints and he literally would sit there for the entire class and do nothing but read off the PowerPoints. It wasn't bullet points for talking off of, it was prose. And it was just an exhausting class. I'm like, just give me the PowerPoint and let me go home. So creating a positive learning climate where people are energized, they're excited, they want to get their creative juices flowing. Looking at how the learning climate differs between people, what's positive for one person may not be for another. Going back to math, when I was taking statistics in college, the professor would put a problem up on the board and he'd go through it and he'd do a step and he'd be like, and the next step is. And somebody would holler out what the next step was, and so on and so forth. Me, I'm sitting in the back going, please don't call on me, because I need to do about 15 practice problems before I can actually go at it that quickly. So some people do better if they have a chance to shine, if they have a chance to apply and really get their hands in and manipulate the material in class. Other people prefer to sit back, absorb, and then reflect on it. So think about examples of negative learning climates that you've been in and why it was negative or why you had a hard time learning in that environment. Be aware that that may not be negative for other people, but it was for you. So it highlights how a positive learning climate can really make it easier to learn and retain things. Personal characteristics. People's personal characteristics, such as whether they believe they can learn it, is going to have a huge impact people, my daughter, for example, will say, I can't learn math. I stink at math. And I'm like, no, it doesn't come as easy to you as writing, but you are actually quite good at math for your age level and grade level and everything else. It's a matter of sitting down and working through it. She hates it and she expects it to be hard. So she creates this situation where she's just dreading doing her math every day. Working with her to identify things that she can do well, working with her to identify when she's creating negative expectations and have her work on trying to focus on positive expectations and also looking at vulnerabilities and confounding issues. If someone is in crisis, if they're clinically depressed, if they're detoxing, they are not going to learn as well as someone who is well nourished, well rested and there and ready to learn, not distracted by anything. Else take that into consideration. When I was in working in a residential situation, people would come to us after three, five days of detox and they would still be in a fog. For me, if they showed up to group on time, they stayed awake, they attempted to participate, you know, and that could even be non verbal behaviors, not necessarily, you know, being all up, raising their hand for every question. But if they came, they stayed awake, they seemed to be trying to pay attention. That was all I could ask. And I would provide information at handouts so they could review it later and then come ask me questions because everybody had their own stuff going on. I wasn't egocentric enough to think that they were going to put aside life to focus on my group at that particular point in time. Peers. Peers also affect learning by their stage of readiness for change. If you're doing a group and there's 15 people in the group, but there's four who are in pre contemplation, they think it's stupid to be there, they're goofing off, they are heckling, they are just doing whatever they're doing, it's going to make it harder to learn. Whereas if everybody in the group is really focused and really excited about what's going on in the group, it's going to be easier for everyone to learn. Co occurring issues also will affect what's going on. If the peers in the group have something going on, if you've got one person over in the group that's crying, they're not going to be able to focus and they're going to distract the focus from the group. So you need to pay attention to what's going on in the environment. In the community. When you're talking about what's important to learn. Some people will be more motivated to learn things if the community is positive about it. But if the community stigmatizes it, like bullying or suicide awareness and they want to try to make it a contentious topic, then people are going to be less likely to want to learn about it. And the availability of peer support in the community. People learn when they're in group or when they're in session, but the majority of their learning and actually taking that information in and making it part of who they are takes place outside of the session. So there needs to be peer support, there needs to be people who have those same skills who can reinforce those skills in the environment and significant other expectations. If a significant other is always identifying your client as the patient and asking them, well, why aren't you fixed yet? Identifying everything as that person's problem. It's going to be harder for the person to learn because ultimately most of the time, addiction and even mental health issues are family issues. So we need to look at the system in itself. But if that person is not willing to change, then your client may hit a roadblock because they've changed as much as they can and something else has to give. At this point, being aware of that significant others may not change. However, helping your client understand when they've done everything they can do and they're working a good clean program is what's really important motivating the adult learner. Six Factors Social relationships Some people enjoy learning because they can make new friends and socialize and improve current relationships with friends and family. External expectations. If they think it will help them improve in their job or at school, or meet another authority's requirements, like their doctor or probation officer, they'll be more motivated to be there. Some people are motivated by social welfare. If whatever they're learning is going to improve their ability to serve the community, improve the community that they and their children live in, they may be more motivated to learn personal improvement. If it's going to make them feel better, if it's going to help them advance professionally, or if it's going to help them stay ahead of competitors, People will be motivated to learn. If it's going to help them escape boredom or change the routine, if it's going to provide new stimulation, people may be motivated to learn or if it's just something that they've always wanted to know about and they're learning for the sake of learning. Some of us love to learn. I love going to the library and checking out books. You know, I don't claim to be a master of landscaping, but I love to learn about it. I don't claim to be a master of needle arts, but I love to learn about it. And I like to practice because there's the cognitive interest of what's out there that I don't know about that I might be able to learn about. That might be something I can add to my repertoire. So the components of learning are cognition, conceptualization, and affective. I need to find another C for that, but I just don't have one. Cognition is how you get the knowledge in your head. Conceptualization is how you process it. Do you think about it in abstract terms or specific terms, and what do you relate it to? For example, if I'm planning dinner, I think in abstract terms. I think I need a protein. I think I need a green vegetable. And I need some sort of a grain. Now, other people may think, I need chicken, I need broccoli, and I need rice. When we're talking about conceptualization, we need to know how people think. Whether they think about specifics or they think in general terms and effectively, if they don't care about it, they're not going to remember about it. They need to have a positive, interested attitude in order to figure out or decide that it's worth making room in their mental storage to file this information away and keep it. Cognition is your knowledge acquisition. When you process information, whether it's in the moment, active learners, like we talked about, or taking in that information and having an aha moment when it's assimilated. Action without reflection can lead to trouble. That means somebody's processing and acting as they go, and they're not stopping to say, okay, in the big scheme of things, am I going down the right path? If you've ever been out driving with somebody who doesn't like to use a map and they're just like, yeah, I think I'm going in the right direction. I'll take a left here. And yeah, I think to get back there, I may need to turn, take a right. And they just keep doing that. And you're like, stop and look at a map, please. That's action without reflection. Reflection without action is somebody who just sits there and thinks about it the whole time and plans, but never actually gets out and does anything. Either way, either extreme is a problem in the recovery process for active reflective learners. For reflective learners, they like to think it through first and prefer working alone. So present the information, give them something to apply it to. Give them something to manipulate it with so they can have that aha moment and then call on them. So maybe break up into group activities or individual activities and have them manipulate it. Then bring them back and say, okay, now, what did you figure out from that activity? Active learners have difficulty sitting quiet through lectures. They love group work, and they need discussion or problem solving activities. You will have both types of learners in any group you do. So if you've got active learners, ask questions that are not rhetorical throughout the presentation. Incorporate group work, because group work is also the time when the reflective learners can kind of chill out and put stuff together and always have activities for the active and the reflective learners that make them apply it to themselves. Knowledge acquisition, auditory hearing, visual seeing, and kinesthetic doing. It's how you receive information. People who learn best by hearing will learn best in lecture, discussion, listening to podcasts, or Even talking to themselves. So sometimes they'll go into a room and they'll just talk it out. Or give them a dog. Let them talk to their dog. But they need to hear the information. People who learn best visually will do best by reading, seeing displays, and taking notes. Kinesthetic learners learn best by doing it. Role playing, paraphrasing, or writing it out and then speaking it. When you paraphrase, you're taking a concept that somebody's presented and you're manipulating it, usually into a shorter form and in your own words, which means you've had to work with the information and understand the underlying concept. So kinesthetic learners can do well with paraphrasing. Sometimes you can't have all of these or some of these. When I was in, when I was in college, we would have these lecture halls filled with 700 people. So the teacher is not going to be able to stop and go, okay, let's all break into small groups and apply this. Not with 700 people. So figuring out how to work around that, breaking out into study groups, having a couple people in my class that I could do a study group with, role playing, etc. That always helped. In order to meet different learning needs, information needs to be presented as many ways as possible. Notes, graphs, and text always include a visual component. It doesn't mean you have to have a dissertation. Preferably if you're presenting something visually with notes, just get to the point. Bullet points. Verbally, you want to be able to hear it and talk about it. Manipulatively, you want to ask questions, have group activities, or have scenarios. Role play. If it's just you and your client, ask questions and give examples throughout the session or throughout the class. Take frequent processing breaks for the reflective learners, even if that's just time to okay, I want everybody to take a minute and think about how this applies to them. Or take five minutes to take a bathroom break. Whatever works in your situation. That way people have time to reflect if they need that time. Sensing versus intuitive people. You know, we talked about this when we talked about temperament. The snap table Sensing People pay attention to details. They don't need the big picture as much to be happy. But it works better when you're presenting to a group, a mixed group of learners. If you give an overview of the topic, present the details concisely, and then summarize again with another overview. Global versus specific learners. You know the global person is going to need that overview. Outlines and meeting agendas are always helpful, even if it's just a one on one session with you and your client. A meeting agenda is extraordinarily helpful for a lot of them, and it's also helpful to keep everything on track. You also have to consider whether people want the big picture or the details. And you've got to find balance. If you present too much of the big picture and get caught up in meta concepts, people people will start to fade out and get lost and daydream. If you present too many details, they may get overwhelmed. So present the big picture and the basics. Then let participants ask questions Bottom up or top down? I've talked about puzzles before. When you do a puzzle, if you use the box to guide how you're going to put the puzzle together, you're probably going to be one of those top down people because you start out with the big picture, the end goal, and then you work down from there. If you get a DVD or you're getting ready to watch a movie on Netflix, do you have to read the synopsis of what it's going to be about first or do you just turn it on? When presenting information again, always start out with a general overview. Provide an outline or agenda for direction, and always answer the question very, very early on, why do I care? And that means why do your students care about what you're presenting? So a lot of this is repetitive between the different types of learning styles. The whole present an overview, then give some details and apply it. Make it meaningful. So hopefully you're getting the idea that it's not overly difficult. But there are a few things that we need to pay attention to. Caring is their affective dimension. Some people care more about stats. I love stats. Other people care about how it makes people feel. When I'm looking at a problem, you know, sometimes I'm motivated to address the problem because it makes me sad or it makes me angry. But then I want to know what is the logical, most efficient, most effective way to solve the problem. So then I get down into the numbers. People who tend to learn attitudinally prefer facts and compelling, objective arguments. People who learn emotionally prefer to learn what will make them feel the best. You know, when we're talking about I do a lot with animal rescue. When we're talking about no kill shelters, I look at the objectives. How many stray and abandoned animals are out there? How many adopters are there annually? How can we make this happen? What other facts may present prevent somebody from adopting an animal? People who learn emotionally just want to figure out how that these animals are not going to get killed. And sometimes they'll gloss over the facts, but it will keep them engaged if they keep their eye on the fact that people the end goal is to keep the animals out of high kill shelters. Tips for Learning Provide enough information but not too much work. Collectively, this is a collaboration between you and your client. This isn't just you lecturing. Emphasize immediate benefits. Learning is not always its own reward. So what is the benefit of learning this information this week? Small group activities or role plays provide learners an opportunity to share, reflect, and generalize their learning experience. And we want to promote autonomy and innovation in our clients. So we don't always want to be giving them the tools and saying, okay, this is what you need to do sometimes. We want to give them a problem and say, tell me three different ways you could solve this problem. Stress order through consistency, fairness, and respect. I want to be consistent about what I'm telling people. I want to be fair in opinions and I want to respect theirs. I want to promote involvement in group governments through shared values, needs, and goals, even if that group is just me and my client. It's important to differentiate between the behavior and the person. If somebody makes a mistake, you know they're human, they made a mistake, they're not stupid, they made a mistake, they chose the wrong behavior, and there's a big difference in there. When we're talking about maintaining motivation, regularly assess attribution statements. If someone is attributing failure to them being not effective, to them being stupid, to them being lazy, that is a global, stable internal attribution which is not helpful. So we want to look at what are some other possibilities of why this could have happened that don't have anything to do with you? Model a positive attitude, empathy, and acceptance and continually reinforce the inherent worth of all of your students, clients or participants, whatever you want to call them, because they're good people, they're trying to do the next right thing and and sometimes there's a little process to figure out how to make that happen. It doesn't mean they can't do it. It just means we haven't found the most effective way for them to do it yet. Develop a collaborative and cooperative learning activity. Seize learning opportunities to teach conflict resolution and stress management. So regularly talk with your clients about conflicts and stress in their life and how they could use the tools that you're working on in session to address those things. Teach how to accept and learn from mistakes. Demonstrate how to build on strengths and help others view family members positively to encourage future learning. So we want those significant others out there to not just always view John as the black sheep or the identified patient. We we want them to view John as John who happened to have made some choices that were not as helpful as other choices he could have made. But those were choices, and those are in the past. So let's encourage him to learn how to prevent relapse and live a happy, healthy, sober life. Adult learners are more likely to retain relevant information. Learning is an emotional, cognitive, and situational process. Information should be presented, beginning with an overview, using as many sentences as possible, focusing on what motivates the person, whether that be facts or feelings taking periodic breaks to apply the information, highlighting what matters, and ending with a personal application of the material.