Goodbye Learning Styles . . .
Over 20 years ago, as a Head of department in a relatively new, Integrated post primary school in Northern Ireland, Learning Styles were our big thing. We knew that the best way for us to build up our reputation as a quality place for learning was to ensure that our practice was grounded in research and good practice. We were a team of young, enthusiastic, energetic teachers who pushed the limits of education at the time. Our boss was constantly reading educational articles and research and would bring them into staff meetings and jump start another initiative.
Sometimes these things proved to be flights of fancy and sometime they lasted longer and got totally embedded into what we did as a school. Sometimes they got so engrained into the DNA of the school, that they became something that would be done across all subjects so that pupils would actually know and be able to recognise the concepts as cross-curricular content.
The ideas behind Learning Styles were something that we adopted and embedded quickly. We often brought Y8 pupils into school and quickly gave them a test where they would identify which of the three Learning Styles – Visual, Kinaesthetic or Auditory was the most dominant. We taught that pupils would favour one of these and this would be the place where they would be able to push themselves to learn better. But, we also taught that a well-rounded learner would need to be conversant and learn how to adopt all three of the styles so that it was not enough for a learner to depend on their dominant mode of learning, but that they would also need to push themselves to engage with learning through their less-dominant areas. It was sometimes confusing. Often, you would find groups of young boys in Y8 excited to tell a teacher that they were Kinaesthetic and therefore could not do written homework and instead could only play football or computer games as they could not learn by looking at images or hearing/ reading stories.
In addition, I don’t think we helped things when we then confused things further by adding in the work of Howard Gardner and his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. We went on to teach the pupils that there was a wider list of intelligences that would help students think about the best way they could learn.
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences from
In some ways this was a useful way of getting pupils to think a bit more about how they accessed learning. What were their main strengths and weaknesses? What areas might they have to work at to reach success? But, it also sometimes left them with a sense of failure. Some of the labels became ones that students did or did not want to have attached to them. Someone (like me) with a tendency towards the subject of geography might want to be seen as good at the naturalist and spatial tendencies. However, we might be quite happy to neglect the musical or bodily-kinaesthetic aspects of learning and maybe even to say that these are not useful or relevant to me as a learner, rather than maybe considering that actually a broad balance of these skills was the true desirable educational outcome.
Over the last few years I have been on a gradual journey of moving away from teaching students about these different things. It probably started when I first came across the work on ‘Mindset’ by Carol Dweck. This idea of a particular learning identity or preference is particularly ‘Fixed’ and goes against the idea that students can make a decision to actually change how they do things. I still liked the idea of the language of the Visual – Auditory – Kinaesthetic aspects of learning being dominant through a particular task and so keep this in my ‘Learning to Learn’ programme for Y8 pupils in my current school. Until this year. Over the summer, I finally took the decision to pull out this aspect of content from the short course that I teach Y8 pupils in my school to try and get them thinking about learning and how they can improve how they do this.
Instead, my focus is going to be on memory and Retrieval practice. I am going to be trying to introduce the idea of dual coding more so that they can work on improving their cognitive load in a more deliberate manner.
References
Dual Coding and Learning Styles
Which Common Educational Myth Limits Student Achievement?
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Why is the myth of ‘learning styles’ so difficult to slay?
Learning Styles – The greatest trick the devil ever trained