Resilience / Learning Styles / Learning Skills

Resilience and Self-Regulation

I think a case can be made that self-regulation is the most important learning skill with the least useful title.  I wish the Ministry of Education had chosen the term "resilience" to describe these attributes.  Here's what we're trying to teach our students to demonstrate when we focus on a student's self-regulation skills: 

• sets own individual goals and monitors progress towards achieving them;
• seeks clarification or assistance when needed;
• assesses and reflects critically on own strengths, needs, and interests;
• identifies learning opportunities, choices, and strategies to meet personal needs and achieve goals;
• perseveres and makes an effort when responding to challenges.

I'd describe much of that as resilience. To be resilient is to believe you have control over your success. I fear that at times when we discuss learning styles or preferences with our students we leave them with the impression that they don't fully control their own success. So to put the teaching of learning skills and thinking about learning styles in context, I'd suggest these three important goals for the discussion:

1. I'm interested in you and interested in understanding your strengths and preferences, to help me be a more effective teacher;
2. I'd like to help you to recognize your interests and strengths so that you can use them to build on your weaknesses;
3. I want you to understand that your learning styles are not a trap, they do not mean a you are only capable of learning in one way.

These three documents try to present these ideas to students. The first is more concrete in its presentation, the last is more abstract:

1. List of learning styles and self-regulation skills: List of Personality Traits / Learning Styles

2. List of learning styles and self-regulation with some analysis: Personality Traits and Learning Styles

3. Scholarly article questioning the research on Learning Styles with discussion questions: Are Learning Styles a Myth?