[From July 5th through July 14th, the SLA faculty is working together in intensive sessions to get ready for September. This is my response to a writing prompt that we had in our planning session today with the Philadelphia Writing Project.]

I think I learn across several modalities. I think my favorite way to learn is socially. I love interacting with folks and hashing out ideas. Listening to ideas… putting my own ideas out there… seeing my ideas shaped and changed by others really is a fun process for me. As a teacher, one of the things I really had to learn early on was that process that I loved so much was scary to some students.

I’m also a reader. I was an English major because I couldn’t think of a better way to spend four years that reading book after book and talking about them with others. (There’s that social learning again.) Blogging — interacting w/ the read/write web combines my real passion for both reading and social interaction, so that’s become a great way for me to learn these days.

When it comes to the way I learn technology, I think I’m a "learn by doing" person. I never was big on reading manuals first. I tend to learn just enough to get started and then the books were a reference guide whenever I got stuck on a problem.

I also have become a kinetic learner. Through playing sports and then through coaching, I’ve learned about how much I love to learn through movement.

I was never much of a visual learner. Using graphic organizers in my own classroom was always difficult because, in planning, they never came naturally to me as a way to explain the world because it wasn’t how I conceptualized problems. Although, as I think of it, when it came to big ideas, either with curriculum or networking or programming, I can think of many times that I had to close my eyes to "see" the ideas before I could put them to words. I think I need to think about when and why visual learning works for me.

I think that teaching — and really trying to be inquisitive about my students’ learning styles and being aware of trying to teach to their different strengths — has made me more aware of my own learning styles and has made me try to branch out the ways that I learn.

— After listening to my colleagues and their modalities of learning, I wanted to add that I am a narrative learner as well. I want to make sense of the world through story. Once I have a narrative that I can hang onto, I have a framework for the learning I’m doing. —