Transcript
Speaker: Yeah, we need to look at everybody's strengths and think of how much we're missing if kids are going through school believing, which they do, believing they're not smart enough, they're not good enough, they'll never get anywhere, they might have a million wonderful ideas, but their writing is not a talent for them.
Speaker: And so they don't know that, wait, dictate.
Speaker: Welcome to How to Have Kids Love Learning, where we explore ideas and strategies for parents and educators that help students thrive.
Speaker: I'm your host, Ed Madison.
Speaker: I'm a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon and serve as Executive Director of the Journalistic Learning Initiative, a nonprofit organization that empowers middle and high school students to discover their voice, improve academic outcomes, and become self-directed learners through project-based storytelling.
Speaker: And I'm Beau Brusco, former ELA teacher and multimedia journalist and Ed's co-host here on the podcast.
Speaker: And it is my honor and privilege to introduce our guest today, Mariemma Willis.
Speaker: Mariemma Willis is an author, speaker, consultant, and trainer.
Speaker: She is the co-author of Discover Your Child's Learning Style, Midlife Crisis Begins in Kindergarten, and The Power of You Now, Seminars for Adults.
Speaker: Mariemma is also the co-founder of Power Traits for Life, an educational program that acknowledges students' natural gifts and abilities and provides them with customized learning programs.
Speaker: Mariemma currently resides in Ventura, California with her husband, Ron.
Speaker: Welcome to the podcast, Mariemma.
Speaker: We're so happy to have you.
Speaker: Hi.
Speaker: Thank you so much for that really nice introduction.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: Thank you for being here.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah, I think a great question to start with, because, you know, learning styles, I've heard about learning styles before, but let's just set the record straight.
Speaker: What is your or how would you define what a learning style is?
Speaker: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker: And also the term learning styles for a while was like a bad word, sort of like it was like, oh, that's nothing that doesn't work, you know, but basically all it means is
Speaker: How do you learn best?
Speaker: And we know we're all different, right?
Speaker: So people learn differently, just like they can communicate differently.
Speaker: They like different things.
Speaker: So it's just all about how does this person learn best?
Speaker: And in our work, we have come up with five areas that we'd look at.
Speaker: There's always more because we can't measure everything about every human, but these are the basic categories that we measure.
Speaker: And so we started calling them power traits because the term learning styles was sort of falling out of grace.
Speaker: But it's the same idea.
Speaker: It's what helps you learn best.
Speaker: Can you briefly give us those five?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So we look at dispositions, which is like your personal learning personality.
Speaker: We look at modality.
Speaker: What's the best way for your brain to take in information?
Speaker: We look at your interests.
Speaker: What are you passionate about?
Speaker: Because that's part of it.
Speaker: Your talents.
Speaker: So what are you just naturally good at?
Speaker: How, you know, that you were born with these things.
Speaker: And then the environment, your surroundings, because they have something to do with, I noticed on your website you had, I didn't print that part, but something about the context is important.
Speaker: The context of learning is just as important and valuable as the content of learning.
Speaker: And we totally believe that.
Speaker: So those are the five categories.
Speaker: Yeah, the context of learning, definitely important when it comes to learning, right?
Speaker: Because it's a lot different when you're just either reading something from a book or looking something up online as opposed to actually being in front of it, being able to handle it, being able to interact with it in a more immediate way, definitely.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And we include other things in that, like your surroundings, like some people...
Speaker: do better if there's music in the background and some people need it to be totally quiet and somebody else needs just background noise.
Speaker: Or working with one or two other people is what really helps them to understand what they're trying to learn and remember it.
Speaker: There's the temperature, there's even color.
Speaker: For some people, color can be crucial or the lighting
Speaker: fluorescent lighting is not that great.
Speaker: And for some people it's, it's really terrible.
Speaker: So all of these things to just be aware of them and what is affecting how you learn and work too.
Speaker: Like how do you, you know, if you're in an office or wherever you are, what's affecting you to do the best job that you can.
Speaker: And I wonder how you advise the teachers are able to make these kinds of personalized things.
Speaker: ways of working with students when in many cases they may have 30, 32, you know, students in a classroom and they're just trying to really, you know, get through the day.
Speaker: You know, it's true.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, you know, we, we've had whole schools that love this idea and they've,
Speaker: sort of empowered all the teachers to use it.
Speaker: So we actually have a power traits assessment that we developed based on these five categories.
Speaker: And so the students take them online and then the results are there and teachers can discuss it with the students.
Speaker: Now you can't do, if you have 30 kids, 20 kids even, or even 10, you can't do everything for every single student, right?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: But there are a lot of things you can do.
Speaker: I know one teacher in particular that was writing to us and saying, you know, after my kids did this, I put the ones that needed to be by natural light by the window and somebody else really felt safer under the table in the corner.
Speaker: And so they were able to work there and
Speaker: Then some kids have headphones because music is helping them.
Speaker: Some kids need to doodle.
Speaker: So I put stuff out for that.
Speaker: And so it's not as hard as you would think.
Speaker: And sort of groups of kids can do a similar thing.
Speaker: You might have three kids that need headphones because music is better for them.
Speaker: So it's pretty easy once you get started on it.
Speaker: And then the other thing is, this is so cool,
Speaker: When kids know that you really want to give them what they need for their best learning, they are all of a sudden it's like, it's okay.
Speaker: You know, it's okay if you can't give me that, but I can do this.
Speaker: So that'll help me a lot.
Speaker: And so then they're much more willing to try to do the other things that maybe are not so much with their learning style.
Speaker: Yeah, I feel like it's also very empowering just to the students for them to know what their learning style is.
Speaker: So even if you're a teacher and you can't necessarily accommodate all of them, if you can get your students to understand their specific learning style, I think that's half the battle.
Speaker: And it sounds like with the five categories, you're just taking into account the sort of unique entirety of a personality, right?
Speaker: And all the variety there.
Speaker: And I think it's useful to help students or your children try to discover these learning styles when they're young.
Speaker: So what advice or tips do you have for parents to help them identify the unique learning styles or help their kids identify it?
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: So, I mean, there's so much you can do just by observing.
Speaker: And a lot of parents already know these things because they'll call me and they'll say, definitely, I know he needs this and this and this or she, but how do we do that?
Speaker: Like, you know, practically, you know, or how do I get the teacher to know about these things?
Speaker: So, for example, the dispositions, we have five dispositions, spontaneous, spontaneous,
Speaker: Curious, imaginative, organized, and supportive.
Speaker: So the spontaneous, you can kind of guess, they need to move.
Speaker: Sitting in a desk, even for an hour, even for 20 minutes.
Speaker: So maybe, and this goes for people who homeschool as well, because they're in a position, a little bit easier position to kind of customize these things, right?
Speaker: So, or for homework, your child might go to traditional school, but they have homework.
Speaker: So if they need to move, they might need a bouncy ball, you know, those, those,
Speaker: like yoga ball things.
Speaker: And so, because just that amount of movement allows them to sit there for longer periods of time and get their work done.
Speaker: Or they might need to stand up like at a drafting type height, you know, like a drafting table height where they're standing up and even have those, I forgot what they're called, those things that you can stand on that kind of move back and forth.
Speaker: They use them for exercise.
Speaker: They're like half dome.
Speaker: Like an elliptical or whatever?
Speaker: Yeah, it's like a little half dome thing and you stand on it and it just kind of moves back and forth.
Speaker: Our listeners can just do a quick Google search to identify it.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Amazon has them because I got one for myself.
Speaker: It's also good so that if you're standing too long, you know, in position, it's not affecting you health wise.
Speaker: So anyway, the spontaneous person needs to move and it's okay to let kids move around.
Speaker: And no, not everybody will want to do that because that's the first question.
Speaker: Well, then all the kids will.
Speaker: No, they won't.
Speaker: I would never have wanted to do that because that's not my style or power trait.
Speaker: So you give them what they need and then everybody learns about all the different styles and there's more cooperation and respect for each of them.
Speaker: So the curious people, they're easy to spot because they have hundreds of questions all the time and they might learn to not ask anymore because if they've been sort of shut down, like you're disturbing the class or that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.
Speaker: Well, it does for them because when they're listening to whatever the lesson is, it takes them over here and now they're going, oh, and they're making a connection and they might come out with a question or a statement that sounds like it's way off, but it's helping them to connect the learning.
Speaker: So you want to, you know, encourage that and support that.
Speaker: The imaginative people, they often are labeled ADHD because they're off in their own heads.
Speaker: And they're the idea people.
Speaker: They're always coming up with new ideas and figuring things out.
Speaker: It might look like they're, you know, it used to be called daydreaming.
Speaker: So, you know, anybody can recognize these styles, right?
Speaker: You probably even know adults that you're going, oh, yeah, my brother or my, you know, whatever.
Speaker: Then there's the supportive.
Speaker: The supportive is the one that loves to work with other people so they can learn better in that way.
Speaker: And they like harmony and doing projects together.
Speaker: And then the organized, that's the fifth one.
Speaker: That's the one that everybody loves in school.
Speaker: That I was an organized disposition.
Speaker: you know you're at your desk everything's neat you have your little planner you have everything were you the were you the teacher's favorite in most classes yep i was yeah you know i i wanted to ask you about this uh uh the book that you collaborated on called my book of me oh yes the i am project um tell me tell me a little bit about that yeah
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So that is a workbook for kids to learn about what we're talking about right now.
Speaker: So they go through it and they look at the different definitions of these, you know, different dispositions and they go, oh yeah, that one sounds like me or I have a combination.
Speaker: You're usually just not one totally.
Speaker: You might be a couple of them or, you know, two or three in combination.
Speaker: And so the kids can figure it out, too, even without taking our assessment.
Speaker: You can figure it out.
Speaker: Parents can, kids can't.
Speaker: So it goes through that.
Speaker: Then it goes through their modalities.
Speaker: And it talks about, you know, the learner that...
Speaker: learns really well by listening and the one that needs to talk out loud in order to learn.
Speaker: You have to say it and hear yourself talk or you need to see pictures or videos or reading is your best way.
Speaker: Or building, making something is your best way or whole body movement and experiencing is your best way.
Speaker: Sketching, that's one, a sketching learner that needs to kind of doodle and sketch while they're listening.
Speaker: All of these things are different ways of learning.
Speaker: And so it takes them through all that and they get to think, yeah, I think that's me.
Speaker: That's me.
Speaker: Then they go through like, well, what can help you in your environment?
Speaker: And what are your interests?
Speaker: What are your talents?
Speaker: Those kinds of things.
Speaker: So that's what that workbook is for the kids to own it themselves and really go through and learn it, sort of experience it themselves.
Speaker: I think it's fair to say you were talking about growth mindset before that became sort of a thing, right?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, almost everything we used to talk about, we developed this work in, let me see, 1988.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so many of the things we were talking about then later came out with, you know, like terms for them.
Speaker: But strength-based learning, that's us.
Speaker: And you have a whole piece about that on your website as well.
Speaker: It's focus on the strengths.
Speaker: Focus on the strengths.
Speaker: And it's through those strengths that if they have to do something over here that's not their, you know, forte,
Speaker: They can learn to do it through their strengths.
Speaker: And plus they have so much confidence if they've been encouraged to use their strengths that now they're not afraid to try something that's maybe a little bit harder or is not their talent or not their primary skill.
Speaker: Everyone's talking about generative AI and I'm just curious if you've had a chance to play around with it yourself or what your thoughts are about how it may...
Speaker: help us give kids a more personalized approach to instruction.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I think all of this stuff is good if it's used in a good way.
Speaker: I have not gotten that far into AI.
Speaker: I know about it.
Speaker: I know some of the things that it can do.
Speaker: I know, for example, about generating, you know, like generating the essay for you or the book report or whatever.
Speaker: And actually, I know teachers who love that because let them do that.
Speaker: And then the kids learn to look at that and bring out the parts that they would put together.
Speaker: And so the final thing is their own.
Speaker: But it's like research.
Speaker: You know, you go in.
Speaker: When I was in school, you had to go to the library when I was in high school.
Speaker: years ago, you went to the library, you got all these books, you made notes on cards, you know, to write your report, your research report.
Speaker: And then you listed all the books where you got that from.
Speaker: But the words are in the books, right?
Speaker: Of course, you're not supposed to parrot it back, but you take notes on the words and then you make them your own.
Speaker: So in a way, it's the same thing.
Speaker: It's just giving us more ways to do that.
Speaker: You know, we use it on our job.
Speaker: So why not teach kids to use it the right way from the beginning?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I know there's a lot of concern about cheating and plagiarism and who's really the author and all of that.
Speaker: But I saw a demo at a conference a couple of weeks ago that that really was it was asking questions as opposed to answering.
Speaker: So it was really prompting kids to write better, you know,
Speaker: analyzing their opening paragraph and saying, hey, you didn't get to the point or whatever else.
Speaker: And so I think it could potentially be a useful tool.
Speaker: Like you say, it's kind of not always the tools themselves.
Speaker: It's kind of what we intend to do with them that can make a difference.
Speaker: Yeah, I think this kind of ties in back to the growth mindset kind of angle we were taking, right?
Speaker: Because
Speaker: If a student feels like, yes, I can do this and AI can enable me to do it, then they still have confidence in themselves, right?
Speaker: And confidence in their ability to use resources like AI to accomplish or learn or whatever it is.
Speaker: But if it comes more from what they call like a fixed mindset, or maybe they don't have that confidence in themselves and they depend and feel like they have to rely on AI because they don't think they're smart enough, they don't think they can figure it out,
Speaker: then I think that's more sort of the negative potential of it.
Speaker: But yeah, it's like anything, right?
Speaker: There's a positive and negative aspect of just about anything, even donuts.
Speaker: One donut is great, but if you eat too many donuts, man, that's bad news, right?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I wouldn't even have one donut, but that's just me.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, but yes, we have great tools, you know.
Speaker: It's wonderful that kids now, if they're a little delayed in reading, you can, you know, put it on so that it'll be read for you.
Speaker: You can go to the computer program and it'll be read for you.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Nobody has to be left behind because they might not have this skill or that skill or that talent.
Speaker: And while they're learning it, because, for example, let's say you have somebody in seventh or eighth grade.
Speaker: And they're not what you would call an eighth grade reader.
Speaker: OK, they're not that great at reading.
Speaker: But they can still learn and they usually know so much.
Speaker: They learn from videos.
Speaker: They learn from TV.
Speaker: There are kids that watch all those National Geographic and science programs and they know much more than I ever did.
Speaker: I got all A's in school, but it was only because I knew how to, you know, my talent was read, memorize, take the test.
Speaker: I didn't really know anything, you know, I mean, I didn't write.
Speaker: I knew that and I could do math.
Speaker: But there were kids in my classes who were getting F's.
Speaker: And I distinctly remember them knowing all the scientific formulas by heart and knowing what they meant, all the chemical names, you know.
Speaker: And I didn't know any of that.
Speaker: But I could get an A on the science test.
Speaker: So it was like that.
Speaker: And so that's part of why I went into this field, by the way, because I couldn't figure out how could they know all this stuff and be failing when I was getting A's and I didn't really know it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know what this reminds me of?
Speaker: And this might sound like a cliche at this point because I think most everyone in education has heard this analogy before, but it's like that comic where a bunch of different animals all have to take the same test.
Speaker: So you have a fish...
Speaker: an elephant and a monkey and the test is like climb up this tree and get this fruit or something like that.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: I have that cartoon.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it won't happen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, we need to look at everybody's strengths and think of how much we're missing if kids are going through school believing, which they do, believing they're not smart enough, they're not good enough, they'll never get anywhere, they might have a million wonderful ideas, but their writing is not a talent for them.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: They don't know that, wait, dictate.
Speaker: But it's considered not a smart thing to do.
Speaker: Well, if you have to dictate, then you're not up to par.
Speaker: Well, it's okay.
Speaker: You might have the most amazing stories in your head.
Speaker: And don't we have proofreaders and
Speaker: editors and all anyway.
Speaker: So it's just one example, but we have brilliant kids that are sitting there thinking that they can't do anything and they grow up to be adults that think they can't do anything.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's, that's too bad.
Speaker: And I know Ed's talked about how it's, it's usually right around middle school that kids begin to believe that they're not good at certain topics or subjects, and then they begin to, to gather evidence to support that, that stance.
Speaker: And so it's really important to help kids when they're young, set them up for success by helping them learn, you know, their, their learning styles and.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Develop that confidence.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, Mary Emma.
Speaker: I think we have to wrap up here, but thank you so much for coming onto this podcast.
Speaker: And yeah, we'll definitely let our listeners know they can find your book, Discover Your Child's Learning Style online, or they can go to your website, Power Traits for Life, and take that assessment to help their students or child find and discover their learning style.
Speaker: Yeah, that's great.
Speaker: And also, I have one more website if you want to know more about homework help or things like that or homeschooling, and it's schoolathomemadeeasier.com.
Speaker: So that's another resource, schoolathomemadeeasier.com, whether it's homework or homeschool.
Speaker: And there are links there to, we have a couple of different podcasts,
Speaker: the series and a blog and all, you know, all kinds of things there as resources.
Speaker: So, and a newsletter, you can sign up for the newsletter.
Speaker: So awesome.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: It was a pleasure.
Speaker: How to Have Kids Love Learning is produced by the Journalistic Learning Initiative.
Speaker: For more information about our work, please visit journalisticlearning.com.
