Learning Styles Don’t Exist

P.S. Did you get the Power of Reading book yet? ;-)

Dan I’m glad you clarified that. I have been following links to your posts all day. As an educator with an undergraduate background in psychology although I can appreciate your conclusion I am also wary of the repercussions for students who may not fit the mold. Specifically, I think in classrooms today what you are seeing is a higher incidence of students with multiple needs being incorporated into regular education environments. Often these needs impair the modalities of which you speak and as a result differentiating instruction and gearing lessons towards multiple modalities not only helps to accommodate these learners but also helps other unidentified learners. Good teaching is good teaching but teachers should and must adjust their instruction to meet individual learners needs especially when there is an Individualized Education Plan that requires them to do so. I hope educators don’t get your message about the learning style fallacy and forget that IDEA and 504 Plans exist for a reason.

Willingham’s post reminds me of the good ole days when inclusion was not part of the school day. Imagine how efficient and effective a teacher could be if he or she could present the material once and have it learned by the appropriate audience rather than 12 different ways to accommodate the learning disability du jour.

NOTE TO ASPIRING TEACHERS: Do not cite Willingham’s theories. You will never get hired.

I can think of many things that are committed to out of a blind belief system that seems to benefit the individuals involves. I think religion is the best example of people believing in something blindly and benefiting from it whether or not it’s actually based on truth.

Also, are you supporting JTHRC’s position about the benefits of excluding children with special needs from classrooms? I hope I’m not reading it incorrectly however your statement “group kids so sensibly” seems to support it. I’m sure you must realize charter schools deal with special needs children in the classroom as well.

The point of identifying someone’s learning style is not to teach purely to it, but to identify potential weaknesses. I believe tailoring instruction exclusively to ones learning style (individualised learning) will actually hinder the learners overall ability.

Learners should strive develop skills associated with all learning style dimensions regardless of the flavour of learning style inventory used. Otherwise they may continue their education significantly disadvantaged by certain teaching modalities.

Making learners aware of their weaknesses and helping them overcome this is as important as teaching to one’s favoured instructional style.

Regardless of learning style instruction needs to be presented in a range of modalities. Learning and teaching style inventories such as the Felder Silverman model are an excellent framework to help ensure that your teaching style spans a range of diverse teaching modalities.

By varying these modalities, a learner is likely to have increased interest and attention and thus engage with the learning activities to a greater extent resulting in better learning.

This is opposed to the teacher that uses only one or two modalities, thus boring the pants of the class, students loose interest and concentration and thus do not fully engage resulting in less learning.

The problem is not that learning styles don’t exist. Its that they’re often miss understood, misused and seen as a quick fix answer for overcoming to poor or lazy instruction or teaching.