Kay Peterson and David A. Kolb are well known in the learning theory world, and prolific authors. One of their best-known contributions is "The Nine Learning Styles", which is a prominent feature in this book. How You Learn Is How You Live is a compact approach to learning theory that seems to be tailor made for corporate retreats and middle managers hungry for a way to get through to their people. The learning styles conversation, began in the 1980s as a counterbalance to the predominant lecture-hall teaching approaches that are themselves deeply challenged, has obtained a pop-culture status through any of a great number of attempts at redefining it. Each of them suffers from the same challenge of summing up all human learning into a very few categories, often with little science to back up assertions. Peterson and Kolb do their best to overcome this by offering a modicum of neuroscience, and expanding on the "each person has one way of learning" to include "we can all learn in all 9 ways with intention and practice." This is much appreciated, as it allows for the reader/practitioner to step outside of their narrow identity bubbles to realize that learning is a broad, complex, expansively gorgeous activity. Although there are more interesting ways to discuss learning, How You Learn Is How You Live has the potential to do what it is created to do, which is provide context for a narrow exploration of communication patterns within an intimate group. |