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David Kolb’s learning styles grew from Kurt Lewin’s four-stage model. Kolb believed that to be truly effective, learning requires moving through all four stages in the model. In each stage, one must use a distinct set of learning strategies. In the context of learning to be a leader, the strategies apply as follows:
- Experiencing what it is like to be a leader.
- Reflecting on what you have experienced and observed.
- Forming beliefs about what it means to lead well.
- Testing the usefulness of these beliefs in new situations.
To enact and learn from each strategy, you need to draw on different abilities, including:
- Being disciplined enough to execute ideas and turn good intentions into action.
- Being open to reflecting on what you have experienced from a variety of perspectives.
- Using inductive reasoning to distil your reflections into mental models of what it means to lead well.
- Using intuition and deductive reasoning to identify situations in which you can experiment with these ideas.
These four abilities can be represented as two pairs of polar opposites:
Kolb's Polar Dimensions of Learning
Just as some people are more comfortable writing with their left hand, each of us has a preferred learning style. You can determine your learning style by identifying two preferences:
- Learning through concrete experience or reflective observation
- Learning through active experimentation or abstract conceptualization
Kolb's Learning Styles
Your learning style describes your preferred way of learning. However, Kolb argues that deep learning involves moving through all stages of Lewin’s model. Therefore, to maximise your learning requires breaking out of your preferred style. The importance of such versatility is even more apparent when you incorporate Dewey’s claim that stages can sometimes occur simultaneously and that you may need to move back and forth between stages in response to the situation before you.
Kolb developed the Learning Styles Inventory (LSI) to help people determine their learning style. You can purchase this tool in either online or paper formats through the Hay Group.
