The concept of learning styles pushes a lot of buttons for me. A lot of valuable work has been done to show
that people learn in different ways, and we certainly need to offer learning
experiences that reflect this, especially in high schools, where an increase in
experiential or “hands on” learning is long overdue. When you a conduct a
traditional “sage on the stage” lesson, there are students who get it from your
words, some who get it from how you write it on the board, others from the
activity you will follow it with, and still others not at all, as they are
prisoners of a system in which the contents are not applied in a kinesthetic, or tactile (hands-on) way, and that’s the only way they could have gotten it.
I understand that
knowledge of learning styles is essential and valuable, but I’ve seen it
hyper-conceptualized by immature educators into an attempt to assign labels to
students. I had a colleague who kept trying to create a way to record each
student’s learning style in the student information system, as if it was fixed
limitation, like hair color. In other
words, a preferred learning style defined
that student. Learning style information is best used in the design and
delivery stages of instruction, to ensure a broad mix of "modalities" (ways of being intelligent and of interacting with content) in the
lesson. I strongly resist the notion of
“preferred modalities" for individuals, unless the design or response is a
truly personalized approach, reflecting the complexities of that person, and
not reducing him or her to a “type,” similar to those identifiable by the Myers
Briggs or other personality tests.
I once had a 10th
grade student assigned from Special Ed to my mixed age writing workshop. He could fix an engine and work a logging skidder,
but was struggling with writing. When he left as a senior, he had given a
number of public speeches, had travelled on his own to the UK, done a stint
as an Elvis impersonator in a nearby city, joined the Army, fought in Desert
Storm, and declared he might want to
become governor. His success is his own, but I feel a small part of it was due to our belief in him as a writer and speaker. I often think, what if we had labeled him as a
kinesthetic learner? Would our
expectations have been reduced for his verbal skill development?
Many have
complained correctly that we reward linguistic intelligence too highly at the
expense of other abilities. It is also
clearly useful to be aware of intelligences, learning styles and special
characteristics of specific cultures we are teaching, as long as we are very,
very careful not to conceive them as limitations, disabilities, or worse,
social descriptors (IE, what’s your sign?)
