Article by Dennis Bennett

The Imaginative Learner that we looked at last time asks the question – Why? Why must we learn this information. Likewise, the Analytic Learn asks his/her own question – What? What are the facts here? What information can I learn from this lesson?

This learner is most like the PCA as a denomination. We LOVE facts. We love details. That in itself is not bad, but it is not complete learning.

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Analytics (and I am one) are content to get fat on facts. We love to listen to long lectures (sermons are lectures). But they are the only learners who thrive on lectures, while all the others prefer interaction. (Pastors, keep this in mind. Try your best to make your sermons more dialogical instead of monological. I’ll handle this in a latter tip.)

We like information presented logically and sequentially. This is very western, unlike the other 2/3 of the world that is more interested in the story and the happening than the time. It is hard to teach many subjects in any way except chronologically, so we must use stories and illustrations to make them more understandable to all learners. (We all learn from stories and illustrations – it is the part of the sermon we remember the best.)

The imaginative learner does not like win/lose type situations because they are people oriented and did not like anyone to loose. In contrast, analytics are the best people recruit on your debate team. They thrive on the facts and will debate their opponents until they cry uncle. We measure everything as correct or incorrect – we hate gray areas. We also need a quite learning space and prefer to work alone.

We love to study our Bibles, as do the others. However, we have a difficulty with having a quiet-time in that we read a passage and want to research something we found in the text. I have to make sure that I have my quite-time in a room away from all my other books, and have to keep telling myself this is my personal time with God and it needs to reach my heart as well as my head.

If you are an information giving teacher who thrives on loading students with all the great information you have discovered, this analytic learner will hang on every word. But remember, the other