I trained as a careers adviser nearly 20 years ago, and these days I'm not really sure what kinds of learning theories get covered in other career practitioner courses. But as someone relatively new to teaching, I have spent quite a lot of time finding out about how people learn, and it's been a revelation to me. My knowledge is a bit home-made, and I'm sure it's not comprehensive, but I can see that even what I know would be really useful for any career practitioner who works with groups of clients.
So, here are my top three favourite learning theories (and a bit of empirical evidence) and what I do differently now that I know about them.
1. The pyramid of learning:
The detail of the study which led to this has been a bit discredited, but the underpinning concepts seem to stand up to scrutiny. The basic premise is that you are likely to remember very little of what you hear in a lecture, a bit more of what you talk about and almost everything that you have had to actually teach.
Students I find can be a bit resistant to this, but when I am trying to get people to get their heads round something really complex, I ask them to prepare a short chunk of a lesson and teach each other. It's complicated logistically, but works really well.
2. Andragogy
This is a fairly old one (Knowles 1958) which is supposed to show how adults learn in a different way from children. I remain unconvinced about the difference between the two groups of learners, but I like what the theory suggests. Knowles suggests that the key to good learning is to link the topic being studied to the participants' lives. First of all the approach holds that to motivate students to learn, they have to understand why they are learning this and what it's going to do for them. Then it's important that the students make links between the new information they are learning and what they already know. Finally a teacher should spend time at the end making sure the students are really, explicitly clear about how exactly they can incorporate their new learning into their practice.
This isn't rocket science, is it, but for me having this explicitly in my mind when I plan sessions is useful.
3. The link between thought and language.
This is probably my very favourite. It comes from Vygotsky, who seems to have come up with a wide arrange of innovative theories. Vygotsky suggests that thought and language are really closely bound up together. He says that thoughts aren't created as fully formed, properly worked though concepts. They start as fuzzy notions, and it is only when they are put into words that the thoughts become concrete. This suggests that in a learning context, each participant needs to be given the opportunity to put their own ideas into words in order to make their ideas more tangible. The words could be written or spoken, and done in pairs, groups or class discussion.
4. Learning styles
This isn't a favourite theory, but it's a favourite bit of empirical evidence. Learning styles have really cornered the market when it comes to learning theories and there are at least 71 different learning style frameworks (Honey and Mumford are the most well known). They are intuitively appealing, and it's always nice to be able to identify what kind of learner you are. But the evidence supporting their value as a way to enhance learning is really weak. It seems to be fairly well documented that people do indeed have preferences - there are definitely people who like looking at pictures more than words, or who prefer thinking about abstract concepts over the application of ideas. But the evidence is pretty consistent that this has very little (or no) impact on how well people actually learn. Visual learners don't absorb more information when it's presented in picture form than in words, and reflectors don't excel when given more space to reflect.
There are a few more. I also like Active Learning (I did a blog post on that last year, I think) and I'm really keen on student-centred learning. And there are probably dozens (maybe hundreds) of other theories out there.
I think my teaching is genuinely better since I've started to understand some of these, and I wonder if careers education broadly might benefit from a stronger underpinning of learning theories?
