Learning styles and inclusion

Before we dig deeper into how we can better reach well over a third of our audience who is likely to experience issues with our content and delivery due to disabilities, ageing, or limiting conditions, we need to establish a few key concepts about how people learn. It’s easy to be misled into thinking that people all learn the same way. To believe that there is one recipe that appeals to everyone. Or that by applying it, you will become a successful and engaging communicator overnight.

Behavioural psychology, the study of the connection between our minds and our behaviour, has been looking into the different ways in which people learn for decades. We’ve come a long way since then in understanding how we can influence people into learning what it is that we want or need to teach them.

This post will introduce you to some of the basics and give you a few ideas as to how you can leverage these principles yourself. But don’t you worry! We won’t get into any of the boring mumbo-jumbo they teach in psychology class! Let’s just focus on basic principles that will allow us to build the foundations necessary to understand how we can apply strategies for inclusion in the way we create and deliver our materials.

Your own preferences don’t matter

To appeal to our audience in such a way that none of our audience members fade away in front of our eyes, we need to share information in various ways. In a previous post, we looked at a few foundational principles related to behavioural psychology and learning. Pavlov’s classical conditioning. Skinner’s operant conditioning. Bandura’s observational learning.

Each type defines a pillar of the act of learning, but none of these actually tells us much about how any of our audience members most successfully learn. Strategically exploring how our audience learns what we’re sharing, and how to tap into those ways is critical if we want to maximize our reach.

Beyond this concept of learning types, people have different learning styles. Simply put, learning styles influence how successful our audience members can be, as they do their best to learn from us. You’ve heard of them: visual, auditory, kinesthetic. Some people identify as visual learners. Others identify as auditory learners. Others identify as kinesthetic, or tactile learners. Each type of learner has its own particularities.

Speakers who don’t pay attention to these learning types are likely to let part of their audience fade out. While most of us will identify primarily with one of those types, the reality is that we all have our own set of needs and expectations that put us somewhere on a spectrum when it comes to learning.

As a communication professional, are you strategically accounting for all three learning styles, as you put together and deliver your content? You should!

Each style has its own particularities that make it unique, and it’s fundamental that we become cognizant of each style. How else can we simultaneously appeal to audience members who respond to different learning styles, or to a style that is different than our own? While most audience members will rely on a combination of multiple styles when learning new information, one style will almost always be preferred or used as the default.

You are probably thinking about your own preferred learning style right now. Have you ever given any thought to how it influences your own learning? How does it influence what you like or dislike about other speaking professionals?

Chances are, how you create and deliver information from the stage is directly affected by your own set of biases and preferences when it comes to learning. Are you unconsciously forcing that particular learning style on all of your audience members?

As speakers, trainers, and professionals who monetize the spoken word, we all want more audience members to take out their phones to tweet how amazing we are. But we also want less people to take it out to kill time on Facebook until they can finally leave the room we’re speaking in! One great way to influence that outcome is to have a strategy for how we will appeal to each person receiving our message.

Presenting concepts in ways that feel right to us, based on our own set of biases, preferences, and levels of comfort – regardless of how much experience we have – isn’t enough.

Our content and delivery need to be about what our audience needs, and what feels right for them. Not what we like best. It might be hard to hear, but no one cares what we like. In a presentation, when we truly want to connect with as many people as possible in our audience, the person whose preferences and needs matter the least is us!

Helping people learn, one learning style at a time

Each person’s learning style defines how they prefer to process, store and remember new information. Each style has its own characteristics that define whether the information we share resonates with our audience. Appealing to only one learning style will likely make people who better respond to another feel like they’re not getting what they need. This is another sure-fire way to cause some of our audience members to fade.

By tapping into each learning style, we can guarantee everyone in our audience gets a little something that resonates with them. Which in turn, leads to more dithyrambic tweets. Leads to less bored Facebook timeline scouring. This leads to fewer people taking a one-way ticket to Fadeout Town, as we deliver our speeches. Everybody wins.

But as speaking professionals monetizing the spoken word, we are greatly affected by our own biases when it comes to creating and delivering content to our audience. Our own biases, our own learning style, and what we’ve been told was the latest trend in speaking often gets in the way of us delivering that message. Our biases may lead to text-heavy slide decks with a gazillion bullet points. Or push us towards image-heavy slides that barely contain any text at all! They may also lead to awkward interactions that ultimately fall flat, just because they feel forced and unnatural.

Again, there are no textbooks on the act of speaking that can work for everyone.

Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.

To become truly inclusive in your delivery, you need to get out of your own head as quickly as you can. Catering to all learning styles will feel uncomfortable at first. We are so heavily defined by our own! But it’s an important first step in acknowledging that our audience is not an extension of ourselves and our own preferences. At best, some of our audience will mirror some of our preferences, some of the time. If your goal is to be truly inclusive of everyone, then appealing to some of your audience members, some of the time, just won’t cut it.

For example, visual learners will do best with visual stimulation. This may seem obvious, but it’s jarring how many speakers don’t pay attention to this. Audience members who lean towards visual learners will appreciate illustrated content and colourful information. Audience members who tend to be auditory learners will do best when information is clearly voiced out loud to them. Kinesthetic or tactile learners will do best when they can take part in what’s happening, such as getting involved in practical, hands-on activities.

While some of us might lean more heavily towards one of those learning styles, most of us will naturally shift from one to the next, based on context and circumstances. The goal, therefore, is to appeal to all three styles alternately, or at once, whenever possible. By recognizing that our learning mechanisms all live on a spectrum and shift from one style to the next, we stand a much higher chance to keep every learning style engaged on a regular basis.

And by tapping into one style or the other on purpose, based on the kind of content we deliver, we can generate the kind of impact we want to create in our audience members’ hearts and minds.

But enough about the theory. In the next post, we’ll talk about all three different types of learners in more detail, and we’ll look into a few inclusive communication strategies you can use, to better appeal to your audience members and foster their engagement.