Catching Sparrows

I came to teaching late, and it was the first time I’d ever heard about “learning styles.” It seemed to make sense at the time and, as often happens in education, was presented as some sort of solid, scientific truth, so there wasn’t much reason for me to question it at first. With the idea came a nearly unending supply of drawing and coloring techniques for supposed visual learners, along with a few get-up-and-move-or-build-with-sticks kinesthetic activities, and lots of music for the auditory experiences. After all, the strategies presented were a catch-all. You could do any of them with any type of lesson, and that was the point, right? To present all lessons with the most amount of activities which crossed all modalities, so every type of learner could learn.

All that would have been just fine if I hadn’t developed these wacky notions that we’re under-educating our older (middle and high school) students and the prime suspect, in my mind, is all the coloring, miming, and other gimmicky activities perpetuated by the idea of “learning styles” and that catering to each of them individually in students creates better learning and more engagement. I’ve started asking a lot more questions (and reading a lot more books) since I first became a teacher, and have been watching the most recent debates/discussion at D-Ed Reckoning (who also mentions Vicki Snider’s book Myths and Misconceptions About Teaching, which I highly recommend) and Matthew Tabor’s blog with interest. I haven’t believed in learning styles for quite a few years now, and I’m taking a close look at Daniel Willingham’s video and article about them.

Willingham, cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist, says we can store memories in many ways, but “memory is usually stored independent of any modality. You typically store memories in terms of meaning—not in terms of whether you saw, heard, or physically interacted with the information.” In his video he points out that “Most of what teachers want students to learn is meaning-based.”

From my experience, posts about learning styles generally generate two types of replies: agreement, or disagreement along the lines of “but what I’ve seen in my classroom is how much they help…” which Willingham anticipates with his response to why this theory is so strongly adhered to: “if you already believe [in learning styles], ambiguous situations are interpreted as consistent.”

I’m not sure why the idea that learning styles don’t exist is so alarming to teachers. Perhaps because it threatens a sacred cow which has appeared to work so well for so long, or appeared to fix the engagement problem in classrooms, or because those “ambiguous situations” are seen as solutions rather than the one thing that worked at that moment, or that it gives some people a reason besides the lesson or teaching to blame a lack of learning on. I’m not sure the video I’m referring to here is the best representation of what Willingham is trying to say, if the goal is to influence teachers. It just doesn’t put out enough fires. His article is much better.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed respondents often seem to misinterpret about what Willingham (and others) are saying about learning styles:

1. They are NOT saying that memory is not stored in different forms.
2. They are NOT advocating rote repetition as the best form of teaching.
3. They are NOT saying people cannot learn through the application of different strategies which may be auditory, visual, or kinesthetic in nature.
4. They are NOT saying that there aren’t situations in which a variety of strategies can’t be used to help students create memory and meaning.

What he is saying, from his article, is that “teachers should indeed think about the modality in which they present material, but their goal should be to find the content’s best modality, not to search (in vain) for the students’ best modality.”

I agree with this, and I’ll tell you why. Let’s take my subject area, English Language Arts and Reading. And I’ll take an example of a seemingly simple concept: nouns. Let’s say I want to teach students to recognize nouns, and I tell them “a noun is a person, place, or thing.” Then, in an attempt to accommodate all those learning styles, say I decide to show them a picture of a person, a place, and a thing (visual), have them walk around the room and point to a person, place, and thing (kinesthetic), and play them a recording of a person talking, the sounds of a carnival, and a dog barking. All fine and good, as far as catering to the idea of learning styles may go. But there are at least two places where I’m going to run into trouble: abstract nouns and gerunds.

Here’s where the idea of learning styles may break down for this particular lesson. What is an abstract noun? Let’s say I explain to my students that an abstract noun cannot be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or touched. I can’t draw a picture of, say, courage. I can show a picture of someone being courageous. I can play a song about a courageous act, and etc., but in doing so I may have limited a student’s complete understanding of the word to the visual or auditory cue I’ve given them. Showing a clip from, say, Braveheart, might limit the student’s understanding to visions of people going courageously into battle, when other interpretations of courage might be more subtle.

Similarly with gerunds: I can show a picture of someone swimming, or the sounds of someone swimming, but that doesn’t provide for students a concrete example of how, when, and why swimming acts as a gerund. And swimming is a word that can actually be remembered visually, auditorily, and kinesthetically. What about deciding?

Certainly, if I really thought about it, I could come up with all sorts of ways to present the material while catering to each of the learning styles, and find a way to differentiate for different, subtler meanings as well. But the premise upon which I base my lessons and teaching is to impart as much information as possible in the most efficient and effective way: in short, to teach as much as possible to a high level of mastery in the shortest amount of time. Making the assumption that a student cannot learn a concept visually just because I’ve noticed on occasion that he or she is more enthusiastic about learning it kinesthetically is simply, in my mind, underestimating the student’s ability to learn, period. That’s another problem with the learning styles. I’m not a diagnostician of any sort. Just because I’ve observed a student enjoying learning something kinesthetically does not mean that student learns best through activity, merely that the student was observed to have enjoyed a single kinesthetic activity.

Why is this important to teachers? A few reasons. First, I have seen an enormous amount of assumption on the part of teachers regarding how a student learns best simply based on the student’s engagement in certain types of activities in the classroom. This is a terrible misconception to base any theory of ability on, and leads to quite an obstacle when the presumed method of best input for the student does not work. Second, trying to hit all the learning styles in a lesson is time consuming for teachers and students, and may not be the best use of time for anyone involved. Third, forcing an activity into differentiation by learning styles is, in many cases, simply forcing a square peg into a round hole and worse, may actually lead to confusion when a clear, concise explanation would have served.

The take-away here is that teachers should be encouraged to consider, as Willingham says, the best modality for the lesson, not try to anticipate every way in which the lesson might be appreciated by students. In other words, teachers should not look at a lesson and ask themselves how to present it auditorily, kinesthetically, AND visually, but rather would this lesson be best taught through an auditory, kinesthetic, or visual strategy?  There will, of course, always be exceptions. But let them be exceptions, not the rules. First day of school for me tomorrow. We’ll be learning about language origins and root words, but we’re not doing any coloring.