It's Not You; It's the Situation - Why People Behave Outside of Their Traits and How That Affects the ADDIE Design Model

2018 was a big year for my interpersonal and intrapersonal development as I sought to best understand how my behavior and my closest friends' behavior was informed by innate personality traits; at 30 years old, I took the Myers Briggs Personality test to discover my MBTI Personality Type and had all my closest friends take it too. According to Myers Briggs enthusiasts and other Personality Trait psychology fans, it is because of my brain's auxiliary cognitive function of Introverted Intuition that I went in depth to study how my brain's cognitive functions interact with each of my friends' cognitive functions. I even studied how our cognitive functions activate in a stressful situation, but Todd Rose who authored "The End of Average" tells his readers that there is even more to behavior that a stressful situation affects; situation matters just as much as personality traits do----sometimes more.

The situation that brought me to Rose' book "The End of Average" was a unique one; I was 37 years old studying Instructional Design at UMass Boston in the Spring 2025 semester in a course tcalled "Universal Design - A Pathway to Mindful and Creative Adult Learning for All." The professor had included a video interview of Todd Rose in the 2nd week's learning materials as an early means to support the concept that creating learning experiences with Universal Design principles begins with understanding that there is no such thing as the 'average learner'; in Rose's research as Director of Harvard's Mind, Brain, & Education program, this concept of a mythical 'average learner' has been a major contributor to the broken state of the American education system. Feeling a great sense of resonance with Rose' research, my brain's Introverted Intuition at play yet again in an educational situation, I quickly purchased "The End of Average" on Audible to spend the next few days conducting a heutagogical study of Rose' work.

Heutagogy is a learning approach that I discovered while in another UMass Boston course I had previously taken called "Adult As Learner." This learning approach emphasizes Self Directed Learning for the purpose of discovering the Zone of Proximal Development mentioned in the work of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which explains how Self-Directed Learning Theory can be most useful in a learning experience---an educational situation!

The educational situation of the Universal Design course landed me neck-deep in Chapter 5 of Rose' "The End of Average", calling back to memory all that I learned in the "Adult As Learner" course from Chapter 1 of that course's textbook, "How Learning Works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching" by Marsha Lovett and colleagues. In Chapter 5 of Rose' "The End of Average", Rose lays out his research on why you cannot anticipate a learner's behavior by evaluating their traits alone. Similarly in Chapter 1 of Lovett's "How Learning Works", Lovett and her colleagues lay out their research on why you cannot anticipate a learner's behavior by the simple fact that the learner has entered the classroom ---an educational situation--- because that learner brings aspects of their human dimensionality into the educational situation, which affects both how they behave there and how they learn there.

Rose' Chapter 5 from his book and Lovett's Chapter 1 from her book are supplemental in that together they both support the idea that there is something for an Instructional Designer to bear in mind regarding the interaction between the educational situation and aspects of the learners' dimensionality, which can include their traits. How can this interaction inform the ADDIE process ---a dominant, industry-wide Instructional Design model --- for the Instructional Designer? How can knowledge of this interaction inform the marketing angle that the Instructional Designer chooses for the learning experience they have created? I posit that a deep understanding of the interaction between the learner's situation and the learners' traits should impact both the Analysis phase of the Instructional Designer's ADDIE process and the marketing voice that they choose for the learning experience they have created; the question is 'how.'

In Instructional Design, there are no perfect answers as even the best-designed learning experiences must continuously be evaluated for efficiency and effectiveness, however, I hypothesize that an understanding of the interaction between intended learner's situation and traits should affect both the Analysis Phase of the Instructional Designer's ADDIE process and marketing strategy by way of the intentional linguistics. I hypothesize that the intentional linguistic strategy of the learning experience and of the marketing for said learning experience can set a continuous tone, which functions both as a siren-call for the Instructional Designer's ideal learner and as a rapport-building signal throughout the learning experience.

Perhaps this brief heutagogical experience of deeply reading Rose' "The End of Average" has brought about the discovery of a new Proximal Zone of Development for me: How to Establish a Linguistic Tone in Instructional Design and in Educational Product Marketing.

References:

• Lovett, M. C., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Ambrose, S. A., & Norman, M. K. (2023). How learning works: Eight Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. (Chapter 1) John Wiley & Sons.

• Rose, T. (2016). The end of average : how we succeed in a world that values sameness. (p. Chapter 5) Harperone, An Imprint Of Harpercollins Publishers.

• Cherry, K. (2022, January 9). ENFJ: The Giver (Extraverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging). Verywell Mind; Verywellmind. https://www.verywellmind.com/enfj-extraverted-intuitive-feeling-judging-2795979

• Lee, E., Hannafin, M.J. A design framework for enhancing engagement in student-centered learning: own it, learn it, and share it. Education Tech Research Dev 64, 707–734 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-015-9422-5