Learning Styles - Teaching Styles

In past posts I have presented my understanding of how instructor's, especially martial systems, have certain techniques and traits necessary to instruct so a practitioner gets maximum benefits of an instructors knowledge, etc. Samurai Girl's blog has posted on learning styles in relation to some instruction concerns and that prompted this post.

My studies of the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, six volumes of material, can be related to martial system instruction as well as any other system where a person will instruct/teach others. I have posted on teaching syllabus and plans and styles and other stuff so this is to compliment those posts.

Samurai Girl: http://samuraigirlsahara.blogspot.com/2011/08/learning-styles.html
My posting: http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~cejames/training/training.html

It has become apparent to me that a fundamental of any teaching or instruction is to follow Dr. Elgin's GAVSD rules. The primary rule I speak of here is syntonic listening, active listening, where you listen for the sensory mode and then match it. This helps you connect syntonically with the other person and promotes this connection that provides for good communications.

When you use this to connect to a practitioner and then enhance that connection with other teaching/instruction methods such as kinesthetic styles you get a well rounded ability to convey fully as humanly possible the instruction. Match this with repetitive effort and intent and the person gets it.

As Samurai Girl's post conveys essentially what Dr. Elgin teaches you learn to recognize those hints that tell you what a person uses as to sensory mode. If the stress is higher the person will gravitate to a primary sensory mode. Yes, we use a variety of sensory modes when communicating at a normal level. It is our job as Sensei to discover what the primary sensory mode is and then match it in our instruction as explained in previous paragraphs.

Sensory modes are another important fundamental principle of teaching/instructing humans in any subject or system. Thank you Samurai Girl for the inspiration for this posting!

My sensory mode learning style: see the moves, hear the explanation and they do it. I really need to see things first. I find that most everything I learn is from seeing it either physically performed or written or what I hear supplemented by demonstration and then doing it. I use the feel of the movement and repetitive practice to encode it. I will come back to check and verify then the cycle is repeated until I have it. My primary sensory mode tho when stress increases is seeing. I suspect that hearing and feeling are still available even if not totally at any conscious level. It is a challenging instruction technique to discover sensory modes of those you are trying to mentor.

These types of posts tend to inspire me and at the same time cause me to wide-eye wonder at the complexities of instruction/teaching/mentoring others. It is a challenge that far exceeds using karate or martial systems. It tends to teach a lot about life and other people. People are a complex system of senses and perceptions and perceptual filters. It explains why often the true self defense is one that most ignore because it is complex and difficult to learn - communications for deescalation and avoidance of conflict, etc.