How I learn?

For the past 7 weeks, I have been doing my best to basically learn how people learn.  While doing the classwork in my Learning theories and Instruction class,  I have continued to construct my knowledge around the constructivist theory, I have developed an understanding of the behavioral learning strategies my wife has been testing on me for years, I connected my previous knowledge of education and the ways students learn to some new strategies and theories, and I now understand that we has adults need to be taught differently because we encode information differently then when we where children.

Now as a learner myself, I believe I am probably even more lost then I was before we begun this class.  I’m not talking about being lost around how people learn,  I believe I understand a number of the different strategies that we've been reading about and I understand how I might be able to teach students who learn in these ways.  My problem is I’m not sure how I learn. 

I know in one sense I’m a behavioralist.  I know I relish positive feedback, have the ability to learn from negative reinforcement, and I am willing to change or learn if it is supported with positive reinforcement.

I believe in another way I learn through cognitive theory.  As I was coaching my little league team this spring, I noticed I started to add schemata to the drills that I was teaching.  Running each player strategically through the movements of being ready, fielding a grounder and seamlessly moving into throwing position.  Through developing this schemata, I figured out that this is very much how I learned in many situations, especially in the field of athletics.  The ability to shoot a basketball or free throw shooting came from repeatedly following of the same steps over and over until it became second nature.

But as I had always thought, I am probably a constructivist learner.  When given the tools to produce knowledge, I am normally at my best when I’m allowed to construct my own learning, taking previous knowledge and combining it with new information in order to construct a new understanding.  I've seen this a lot when working with new technology, I am more likely to try things out and create my own understanding of the technology before I will read instructions on how to use it.

As you might assume at this time, I definitely can see myself as an adult learner and with that being said much of what I learn is through technology.  Weather it is obtaining new information through blogs or online news sources,  creating new pieces of work through apps or online programs that allow me to share my work, or keeping track of information I've discovered, developed and shared with the world, technology is a major part of my life and seems to becoming more so every day.