This semester I took the experiential learning class. One of the weeks we spent learning about our individual learning style. My learning style is the Experiencing Style, which means I find meaning from deep involvement. It means I try and connect with my teacher, if I don’t like her then it is going to skew how much I take away from that day’s lesson. I learn better in groups because I don’t like being the only one able to answer questions. I prefer someone else to answer them and then I learn from their mistakes. I also seek out feedback from fellow coworkers or leaders at work.
During my training at Disney I was training with two other people. This enabled me to exercise one of my learning strengths without even realizing it. I was trained with two other cast members and I took a back seat and let them answer a lot of the questions and do much of the work. However I didn’t realize I was learning from their mistakes as much as I was. Another thing I didn’t realize was when I would be alone for the first time that I would continue to learn in a different way and slowly bring everything together.
Once I become comfortable in a workplace I like to check in with my managers and see how I am doing. I take whatever they say and use it as constructive criticism. I also do this in my personal life. I will simply ask my friends what my biggest flaw is and what I can do to improve on that.
I have found that these two learning strengths of my learning style have helped me grow into a better person. They have really come to define me as a character without even realizing it.
My sister has the initiating learning style, which means she has the ability to initiate actions in order to deal with experiences. My sister has the tendency to jump in and try out new and challenging experiences. She can also be seen as spontaneous, energetic, persuasive, and courageous.
Last summer my sister learned how to sail. The way she learned this directly ties into one of her learning strengths. She literally jumped on a boat and said to her friend that was sailing it, “Teach me how to sail.” Thus she began her first sailing lesson. From that day on she would buy books and just show up at her friends yacht club trying to learn as much as possible about sailing until she felt comfortable enough that she could take charge of her friends boat.
My sister is also very spontaneous and highly energetic. An example of this is when she woke up one morning and she woke me up and said “I am going to Peru tomorrow”. I simply replied “How? You didn’t even plan it” She simply just bought a plane ticket and booked a hostel and she was off to Peru. I was always jealous of her in this way. She had the ability to learn so much from her spontaneous moment. My sister and I have two very different learning styles and I love it.
Working in teams is a very popular way to get tasks done. If you are working as a team you might run the risk of having the same learning style. If this happens you might produce something fairly quickly. This is great and all but no one might have reflected on it and thought twice about it because you all share a preference of action, but no one has reflecting or analyzing.
If you were able to have a group work on the same project but with different learning styles you might receive conflict. If you have someone who analyses every detail of every project working with someone who just acts rashly. The person who acts rashly might get annoyed at the analyzer because he might think he is holding up the project. However the analyzer might think that the person who is acting rashly is jeopardizing the whole team for not checking their work. There is no solution to this conflict as both employees may be right. They just need to learn how to work with each other and their different learning styles.
