9 Responses

1. train AVK??

   Hi

   can you be more specific? remember AVK are internal processes than a learner uses – so there is little to train, other than an awareness that people are different!

   and to complicate the situation, many people will have a different AVK profile for the nature of the learning involved!

   Mike

2. original task

   — Teaching is never ending learning process…

    

   My task is to teach them how to use the knowledge in VAK(Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic) on their daily coaching sessions with their subordinates.

    

   My apologies for not clarifying things.

    

   Dajhan

3. Colour Coding

   Hi Dajhan

   Get them to look at their existing techniques and processes and then use colour code to differentiate between VAK. This will give an immediate and clear indication of how balanced the material is.

   Some useful stuff here including a self questionnaire…

   http://www.businessballs.com/vaklearningstylestest.htm

    

4. Helping coaches to use VAK in their coaching

   Hi Dahjan,

   I’m a little bit wary of promoting the ideal of ‘VAK preferences’ too much, as all learners use all of these modes in their learning and need to be encouraged to develop a wider range of attitutes, beliefs and behaviours if they are to become really effective learners. However, it is good practice for a coach to be aware that they can engage all of the learner’s senses in their coaching and develop techniques for doing this.

   Here are three skills you might want your coaches to develop.

   1. Using language, specifically in their questions, that encourages learners to use all of their senses. eg. "How do you see your future career? What picture do you have in your head of where you want to be? What do you want to hear people saying about you when you achieve your goals? What is your inner voice telling you? How does it feel to be in your current situation? What will you feel like when you reach your goal? How can we move you from here to there?"

   2. Offering a range of different methods to encourage learner’s to process and remember the ideas and information they are working with: eg. drawing diagrams and mind maps, creating checklists, identifying key ideas and attaching a piece of music to each of them, writing and saying aloud strong statements following a rhythm or beat, moving to different parts of a room to access different memories

   3. Encouraging learners to use the VAK modalities more fully by:

   a) challenging the normal responses: for example, if a learner constantly says, "I THINK this is needed?" asking "How do you FEEL about that?" or

   b) helping to develop one of the modes: for example if the learner says "I can’t SEE where this is going" suggesting "Let’s have a look at some images and see if we can find something that helps you to see more clearly."

   Hope this helps!

   Ann

5. Coaching coaches in VAK

   Hi Dajhan,

   If, as I understand it, you want your people to coach using knowledge and understanding of VAK learning styles, the first step for me would be to get them practicing spotting the coachee’s language. So, to start to notice a preferred style, picked up in the way they describe things and spotting patterns. Remember there may be a decision strategy embedded within their predicates (sensory based language). For example, someone may make decisions based on the following: see tangible evidence, then, check it feels right, followed by some positive internal dialogue ‘let’s do it’. 

   Once they begin to notice the sensory language being used, they can match their own language to the person they’re coaching to build rapport and gain richer information. They will also need to practice using different predicates to get a full range in their own vocabularly (remembering that they’ll have a preference and their language will reflect that preference).

   When you are working with someone on goal setting, it’s important that you gather evidence of success across V, A and K to make it really compelling. It’s extremely difficult to work on success if the visual channel is missing – you need to know what success will look like, so at the least, if they don’t have this, encourage your people to ask that question – ‘so what will success look like for you?’.

   Practice is key and as they become more skilled at spotting, matching and leading others to more ‘channels’ of language, the more trust builds and the coach can delve deeper and become more effective. You can make these practice sessions fun – like a sort of ‘mastermind’ style approach! (perhaps someone starts with a visual word, and the next person has to match with another visual word and then follow with a different predicate, or get someone in the hot seat and ‘fire’ predicates and them as they have to tell you if it’s a V,A or K word)

   Let me know if you’d like more info – we have a coaching and mentoring methodology that new coaches have found really powerful and easy to use.

   Feel free to email me at ks@raconsultancy.com

   Regards

   Karen

6. Thanks for a good advise.

   Your replies fixed my direction on how shall I guide these new coaches. I carefully reconstructed my training plan based on your replies.

   Thank you very much.

   Dajhan

7. Learning Styles

   Before you embark on this project, you might care to read:

   "Learning Styles: Concepts & Evidence"

   H. Pashler, M. McDaniel, D. Rohrer  R. Bjork

   Psychological Science in the Public Interest vol.9, no.3, December 2008

   which suggests that there is virtually no evidence to support any notion of Learning Styles.

    

    

8. Read it…

   I did read that book before, and unfortunately, the authors did not convinced me for they failed to explain 1 thing. Why does a lot of learning styles program worked in the past.

    

   Their worked also seems like a little biased, for their work did not include the works of other learning styles researchers. Here’s one of the reviews for thier work.

    http://chronicle.com/article/Matching-Teaching-Style-to-/49497/

   I’m not a fan of learning style, but I’ve seen a lot of programs using this that really worked, but were focussed on other forms on training. My task was to teach coaches on how can they use VAK (or VARK), to make their lives easier when coaching subordinates, and that’s why I brought it up here. To get more inputs.

   Dajhan

9. VAK
   Karen brings up a lot of good points regarding the VAK learning style. Of all the things that she suggests, in my opinion, practice is the most important part of this. The more comfortable they are with it, the more effective they will be on it. I was studying this topic quite extensively a year or two ago and practice was the biggest thing that I took away from it. Good luck!