Learning Styles

Pragmatist

They want to see if ideas, theories and techniques work in practice. They seek out new ideas and take the opportunity to try them in practice as soon as possible. They like to get on with things and act quickly and confidently. They take ideas away from courses, events, discussions and at the earliest opportunity experiment with them in practice. They want to get on with things, so are impatient with long winded discussions.

After taking part in the questionnaire, adding up my individual score and looking into the four different categories, overall I came out top as a Pragmatist closely followed by a reflector and joint Activist/ Theorist. I do agree that I learn best through taking part and seeing the processes put into practice. I also believe that the main attribute to my nature is the way I try to act quickly and confidently in most things I do and I greatly enjoy taking away the beneficial things from courses and discussions and coming up with ideas that I can then put into practice within my own course work. My weaker area or less engaged area would have to be my activist side. Although I would disagree with this slightly as I usually am up for trying new things and getting fully involved in new experiences, I do think the others take more of an important role in my life. Seeing as most types of my learning were scored closely together I do find other roles taking a more dominant approach in different situations and mixing between all four regularly.

A lot of people within our group found the categorising challenging because although we have spent a semester together it’s hard to work out what people’s styles are from brief encounters. The louder more involved people within our group where then stereotyped as being the activists whereby they take the role of acting first and then consider the consequences later. They are also enthusiastic about new things and involve themselves fully in new experiences. The quieter more reserved people for me were quite difficult to identify but after studying them more closely certain aspects of their personality labelled them: - reflectors, theorists or pragmatists.

After everyone came together and discussed what each person’s style was within our group, the dominant modes were equal between the reflectors and activists, with myself being the only pragmatists.

I think everyone can learn a lot from one another in a group that is very similar within their learning styles or very different, it’s just really what the individual takes away from it. People labelled as activists are used to jumping into things and I suppose taking control with in certain matters but these people especially in my group will have to work with others similar to them and learn to delegate different roles within a task, which may lead to certain individuals being left outside their own comfort zone. In order to complete jobs within a time scale these people will have to learn to work differently to obtain a better result and the same goes for others with similar learning styles. For me, being the only pragmatist I think being around people that are eager to learn and act straight away will encourage me to do the same in order to keep up and have a say in the final outcome. Thus also being the same for them.