Resources

A great deal of research has been done on thinking and learning. These topics have interested me since my days as an undergraduate physics student. In the course of my 20-year career in education, I have used many teaching methods that result from these studies.

From the dozens of different models of thinking and learning, I have chosen a few especially well-tested approaches to use in the Awareness Learning workshops.

I provide links to a few online surveys, which must fit several criteria. The source must be academic, and the ideas underlying the survey must be described in the peer-reviewed educational literature. The website presenting the survey must not be commercial, nor require the user to sign up for anything. I take all the surveys myself, and judge the usefulness of the survey report. Parents are strongly encouraged to visit these websites with their children.

Dependable Strengths My all-time favorite activity comes from this workshop. We were all told to remember a time when we did something really well, and felt great about it. We drew a picture of the memory, and told the story to the group. Then we identfied the strengths and qualities revealed by the experience. The creators of this process descrbe it thus: Dependable Strength Articulation Process

Personality Types Two common ways to describe personalities are Left Brain Vs Right Brain and Introvert Vs Extrovert. In the workshop, we combine these two ideas into a personality map. There are many personality tests online, but none I really like. Instead, I encourage students to read descriptions of these personality types and decide where they fit in. Here's the relevant section of the Awareness Learning workbook.

Multiple Intelligences Everyone is good at something, and our abilities can be described as different intelligences. We can be Word Smart,Math Smart, Music Smart, Nature Smart, Self Smart, Picture Smart, Body Smart or People Smart, and some people are Deep Thinkers. Here are resources for:

• understanding multiple intelligences
• identifying your strongest intelligences.

Learning Styles We all learn differently. Many aspects of our learning styles can be described as a balance between one of these pairs of extremes: Active/Reflective, Sensing/Intuitive, Verbal/Visual and Sequential/Global. Here are resources for:

• understaning learning styles
• determining your learning styles