DCPS's policies have long been significantly driven by pedagogy fads straight out of the latest inane D.Ed. theses. There's the direct influence of Congress, several prominent Ed departments sending in troops, and an expensive top-heavy bureaucracy full of idiots.
Teacher Education has always been pretty bad, but adding massive financial incentives for teachers to obtain graduate degrees has led to an explosion of idiocy, even at otherwise top-tier schools. In the DCPS every teacher I saw go back to school (and not just the diploma-mill ones) came back dramatically worse as a teacher -- any cleverness hammered down, any laziness replaced with thoughtless zeal.
My two cents as an educator of business people? Any system that tries to categorise from an EITHER/OR perspective will be limited - human beings are too complex to fit into neat boxes, especially when there are only three options.
When you come from an AND perspective, you can use these frameworks (eg, using Visual AND Aural AND Kinesthetic tools in a lesson plan). Students are their own unique combination of factors, and by using all the tools available you as the educator are creating a framework for them to learn according to their own needs.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was where any success of the system comes from. Simply providing students with different ways to learn gives each of them the ability to pick and choose what they will learn best with.
My problem with the "different learning styles" theory is that it is quite disempowering. There aren't many "aural" ways to understand quantum mechanics. I am concerned that "accomodating different learning styles" is really just about dog tricks to meet classroom objectives, rather than giving kids the tools they need to enable them to exceed expectations (most won't, but some will).
While I never went as far as QM I learned a lot of math by listening to a teacher walk though the problem. I have had plenty of classes where I could not read the teachers handing writing and I still got A's on the final.
PS: As a rule I never studied which was fine to get the equivalent of a major in CS, and a minor in math. (I was like 3 classes from a double major, but I took a semester off and wanted to graduate in 4 years.)
I've done commercial IT training in the past and came across this learning styles stuff during a training-the-trainer seminar. I have found that it seems that most of the benefits accrue from repetition and re-enforcement, rather than anything to do with learning styles. In order to try to take advantage of different learning styles, you will end up explaining the same topic in different way and presenting the same information in different styles - spoken, written, diagrammatically, through interpretive dance, etc... Even if 'learning styles' are bunk - which seems quite possible/likely, the repetition and re-enforcement are pretty much essential anyway.
There is a very old saying that undercuts a lot of the type of learning styles he mostly discusses : "Hear it and forget it, see it and remember it, do it and learn it"; which is mostly concerned with the student's interaction with the material. I am very poor at learning material aurally, but I have noticed that even people who can respond more effectively to aurally presented information still seem to have more trouble remembering that information than things visually presented.
Also, he claims that no learning styles theories are well supported; but I have used learning style theories based on 2 different bases that seem to help. First is groupers vs stringers (see Lewis and Greene's "Thinking Better", 1982), some people seem to learn better by encountering small groups of related facts simultaneously, while others absorb one at a time like beads on a string more easily. Second, is whether you begin with lots of details and build up to an overview of the subject, or start with an overview and fill in the details later. Both of these "styles" are continua, not exclusively either-or, and people tend to use a slightly different balance of style on different materials.
Also, I saw a review of his book mentioned in the lead to this article, "Why Don't Students Like School", http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why... , and he seems to be a bit out of touch with real world classroom and student behavior.
I don't know about public schools, but homeschoolers find the concept very useful. I have two 2e kids (gifted and learning disabled) and accommodating for their learning styles has been helpful for getting past weak areas. However, it is also true that some things are best taught in a particular format. For me, I am not good at absorbing things aurally. If I'm tired, please don't try to read something aloud to me. Hand me the flippin book so I can look! I won't follow it and I won't retain it if you try to use my weakest pathway when I am already not at my best. Visual-spatial approaches are generally better for me.
The schools manage to muck up lots of things by bureaucratizing them. That doesn't mean it's a completely useless concept.
That doesn't mean it's a completely useless concept.
...except that according to the article, it is a useless concept, with that conclusion backed up by data.
So you're really saying that you think the research that the article is based on is somehow wrong. Which is possible, for sure, but without finding the article and actually looking through it, I can't comment on that.
Unfortunately, the data this piece claims proves it just doesn't work is not cited, at least not that I can find. So I am unable to examine that data or comment on it. I have seen lots of flawed studies, and even participated in them. For that reason, making a sweeping statement about what "the data" proves or disproves carries zero weight with me. Show me your data so I can decide for myself if it actually supports the conclusions you have drawn. Again: Even if the conclusions that it doesn't work in public school are correct, that doesn't necessarily say anything about how useful it is to homeschoolers.
Even if this unspecified data debunks certain models for differentiating learning styles, that certainly does not imply that no such differences exist, just that the correct model has not yet been identified, or at least not widely accepted.
Personal observation of myself and those who were educated along side me prevents me from even considering the possibility that everyone learns in the same way. That there are differences is blatantly obvious, though I can't claim to completely and precisely understand the nature of those differences.
However, I do strongly suspect that catering to certain common learning styles would severely disrupt the status quo in today's school system, and that research which recognizes those styles is not received with enthusiasm.
What is this? He seems to be arguing against an issue that doesn't exist. As far as I know, there isn't a single school that classifies students as Visual/Kinetic/Aural and then locks them into only those sorts of classes. Instead, they have teachers teach in a number of different ways.
Even a closer look at his anecdote seems ridiculous. Watch kids on a museum field trip and you’ll notice that they stop to look at different paintings: some like cubism, some like impressionism, some like the Old Masters, and so on. That is precisely correct. In the same way though, allowing students to experience art in several different ways allows them to get it much more (get, as in learning about the material). What he seems to be arguing against is telling the students they can't spend the entire trip looking at the Monet paintings, that they have to see the entire museum.
Separating kids into different sorts of classes would be tracking, which in most places is considered an unspeakable horror.
What he's arguing against is what happens after you 'train' teachers on this pedagogy -- they parrot it directly to their students. Common behaviors include: constantly narrating their actions - 'and now for the visual learners' and drilling identity into the students - 'Don't worry, you're a kinesthetic learner.
Your average education student has no poker face -- they can't apply a pedagogy without rubbing it in.
I'm confused. How is that a problem? A student who is having trouble with a problem, rather than being told "Huh. You must be some special kind of stupid, everyone else got it" is instead told "Huh, you must be a real kinesthetic learner."
That does not seem like a problem in the slightest. Yes, it does assign part of that as an identity to a student, but an identity as "Visual Learner" is a lot better, and significantly more useful that "Bad at math." I can't tell you the number of people who have said they were "Bad at math" when their only problem was that they had only ever been exposed to visual math lessons.
I still don't understand what is exactly the problem with having children identify with a learning style. Yes, "their" learning style is more based off of preferences than anything, but being able to acknowledge that you prefer to learn a certain way seems be a step up, not a step down as the article seems to be arguing.
I don't remember being told (or even taught specifically as if I were) one of the three "learning styles."
I do remember being told, "Stop asking questions and finish your worksheet. If you have questions, stop after school." And then after school: "God, you're stupid. Didn't you pay attention in class?"
Of course, this was 6 years ago at a magnet school in an honors math class.
Since then, I've taught myself (rudimentary, but useful) calculus... go figure.
There are two very broad classes of learning style theory; the article addresses one. Variants of this theory are basically a distillation of the near-obvious: Our brain gets information from our five senses, so use the five senses for inputs. Makes sense, but I was underwhelmed when I was first introduced to learning styles as a pedagogical tool.
But there is a second type, a more cognitive approach, that is very interesting. This approach deals with the way the information is organized in our brains. As an example of a contrast between these two styles, for the first type "reading" is a visual activity, whereas for the second type it is a "verbal" activity. The second set of theories also differ between those that learn in a linear fashion (sequentially) and those that need to see the organizational structure of a large part of a subject before they can make sense of it (global learners).
I am excited by the trends in medical brain imaging to see if these differences (the second class) will be able to be detected, but (somewhat sadly) I have to agree with the author that the evidence is still lacking.
I really like Willingham's take on this. I should note for the record that I refer to different ways of thinking about math when I teach my math classes (prealgebra and contest problem-solving for young elementary students), but I also assure my students that they can learn new ways of thinking from me and from one another, and end up with a larger toolkit for solving problems than they had before they started the class. I've always thought that learning styles are LEARNABLE, and that most actual human learners don't fit into one Procrustean bed or another consisting of just one learning style.
An example of a mathematics textbook series that appeals to multiple problem-solving approaches is the Singapore Primary Mathematics series
I take this to mean no one is "stuck" with a particular learning style. If that were the case, few auditory learners could earn PhDs because of the amount of required reading. Instead of trying to accommodate different learning styles, why not teach people how to learn better using available materials? There is a massive amount of print material in every field. There is not much audio or kinesthetic material in many fields. Therefore, we'd better learn to be visual learners if we want to master the broadest range of material.
Teacher Education has always been pretty bad, but adding massive financial incentives for teachers to obtain graduate degrees has led to an explosion of idiocy, even at otherwise top-tier schools. In the DCPS every teacher I saw go back to school (and not just the diploma-mill ones) came back dramatically worse as a teacher -- any cleverness hammered down, any laziness replaced with thoughtless zeal.