Learning Styles

The Four Quadrants of the Brain
* As an adult learner, have you noticed that you find some subjects easy and enjoyable to learn? But that learning other subjects entails industrial-strength pain?

* As a teacher of adults, have you noticed that some students in your classes are avid, effective learners - while others can't seem to get with the program?

* Whether you're a learner or a teacher, have you noticed that in everyday life, you relate to some people smoothly, while with others the process of interaction seems gnarly? Or that some tasks at work, or in your personal life, give you pleasure and satisfaction, while others are boring, irritating, and difficult?

All of these commonplace experiences derive from the same cause: the fact that we each have a preferred learning style, and that we learn most readily when we can use that style.

What does this mean for adult learning and teaching? How can we overcome the problems caused by these brain-style differences? Indeed, can we turn them into advantages and opportunities?

Here, some suggestion from some practical ways that learning and teaching can be enhanced by acting on the fact that we differ in the ways we learn the best developed by the late Ned Herrmann and currently carried forward with great integrity and verve by his top colleagues (www.hbdi.com).

Briefly, Herrmann suggests that we think of our brains as divided into four quadrants, each of them with distinctive strengths:

Left Front: Logical, Analytical, Theoretical, Quantitative

Left Rear: Sequential, Organized, Evaluative, Prepared

Right Front: Synthesist, Exploratory, Conceptual, Experimental

Right Rear: Kinesthetic, Emotional, Feeling, Sensing

This scheme is not a literal map of the anatomy of your brain. But it does reflect the ways in which different physical locations inside your skull specialize in different ways of processing information.

For example, in most people the areas that handle speech and verbal logic do indeed lie behind the left ear. Hippocrates noticed this: when soldiers were brought to him who had been struck in the left side of the head, they often lost the power of speech, but the same wound on the right side did not produce this result.