How to Coach Yourself and Others How To Perform On The Job Coaching | Page 58

Diagram of Kolb’s learning styles

See also the personality styles and models section for help with understanding how Kolb's theory
correlates with other personality models and psychometrics (personality testing).
Learning Styles
Kolb explains that different people naturally prefer a certain single different learning style. Various
factors influence a person's preferred style: notably in his experiential learning theory model (ELT)
Kolb defined three stages of a person's development, and suggests that our propensity to reconcile
and successfully integrate the four different learning styles improves as we mature through our
development stages. The development stages that Kolb identified are:
- Acquisition - birth to adolescence - development of basic abilities and 'cognitive structures'
- Specialization - schooling, early work and personal experiences of adulthood - the development
of a particular 'specialized learning style' shaped by 'social, educational, and organizational
socialization'
- Integration - mid-career through to later life - expression of non-dominant learning style in work
and personal life.
Whatever influences the choice of style, the learning style preference itself is actually the product of
two pairs of variables, or two separate 'choices' that we make, which Kolb presented as lines of axis,
each with 'conflicting' modes at either end:
Concrete Experience - CE (feeling) -----V----- Abstract Conceptualization - AC (thinking)
Active Experimentation - AE (doing) -----V----- Reflective Observation - RO (watching)
A typical presentation of Kolb's two continuums is that the east-west axis is called the Processing
Continuum (how we approach a task), and the north-south axis is called the Perception Continuum
(our emotional response, or how we think or feel about it).

58