Last year, our winter feature story "Something for Everyone" looked at various types of attendees, their learning styles and how best to reach them. For the story we spoke with Sue Pelletier about tailoring meetings for different learning styles, based on some comments she had about Q&As on her blog. In the story, she had this to say about teaching to different types of learners: "It’s vitally important. Unfortunately, it’s also something that’s fairly rare, in my experience anyway."
Last week, on her Face2Face blog, Pelletier revisited the topic: "I’ve been to many sessions at industry conferences that teach about different learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile), and I do believe that different people may learn best in different ways." However, as she points out, a recent story from NPR proposes a different view on the topic, stressing that we should look at similarities rather than differences in how we learn.
I'm a person who gets easily bored with speakers unless they add interaction or videos. They have to fight against my natural impatience/Gen X attention span. So I believe in the idea of teaching to different types of learners. But maybe this new research will also lead to strategies that can help. What do you think? Do you tailor your meetings toward different learning styles?
--Ellie M. Bayrd
Associate Editor


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