How Do You Learn Best? Understanding Your Learning Style

Unless a kid has been assessed for unique learning challenges or disabilities, they will have to survive in a one-size-fits-all model of learning. Good teachers will employ strategies to provide differentiated learning plans within a classroom using scaffolding techniques. They know students have different learning styles, and they do the best they can to offer the resources to adapt to those differences. But with large class sizes, fast-paced trimesters, a focus on testing, and ultra-competitive college admissions, not every student will get the opportunity to develop a love for learning, an awareness of their learning style, or have the time to pursue their curiosity.

That's a shame, to say the least.

If you can't cope with the system, you'll get left behind. If you can't hack it, you'll feel like something's wrong with you. Valerie Strauss, director of the scathing documentary The Race to Nowhere, talks about the unintended consequences of focusing exclusively on performance on test scores in a Washington Post article: “Even for those students who stick with it, tests degrade the educational experience, fueling performance anxiety and the false impression that academic success is about speed, accuracy and competition.”

For all the emphasis on testing, there are millions of kids who are being left behind, and millions more who meet the educational requirements but are missing out on actual learning.

Sir Ken Robinson (R.I.P.!) famously said in one of his TED talks, “The dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but are disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.”

So what can we do, as adults involved in the education of kids?