Teaching to different learning styles is a big deal in education. During the last two years teaching French at Spearfish High School, I received formal evaluations that included items like "preparation for student learning differences" and "motivation and direction of students’ learning styles" (according to my February evaluation, Mr. Heidelberger "meets standards" on those items). I received reports from the SHS guidance office assessing the learning styles of my students (e.g., visual, auditory, kinesthetic). Reformer Albert Shanker, in his call for a teacher bar exam, says tests of our pedagogical chops should assess our "ability to apply educational principles to different student developmental needs and learning styles." The Danielson framework for evaluating teachers, which South Dakota is imposing on all school districts, expects teachers to teach to all learning styles.
Teaching to different learning styles may also be an effort to sprinkle pixie dust. In its darning assessment of teacher training programs, the National Council on Teacher Quality says a big factor dragging down the quality of teacher training is the focus on learning styles, which NCTQ says are bunk:
...the lesson planning guidance provided in most programs can only be described as voluminous and incoherent. And once one sifts through the volume—as we did to evaluate the standard—few of the requirements we looked for are to be found, even once. Requirements are overly general in some documents (e.g., “Differentiate instruction to deal with the diversity of your classroom”), or unrealistically expansive, asking the candidate to delineate means of differentiating instruction for students with a dozen or so specified characteristics in a daily lesson plan.
In the midst of very little consistency even within each of the sets of program documents evaluated on this standard, and certainly across sets of documents from programs in different institutions, one element of consistency does emerge: the direction to teacher candidates to plan for instruction that considers students’ “learning styles.” Unfortunately, this recommendation has been thoroughly discredited by research as
ineffectual and distracts the candidate from more productive planning considerations. Nonetheless, the “pseudo science” that learning styles be considered in planning lessons is advocated by three-fourths (74 percent) of programs [emphasis in original, Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee, and Kate Walsh, "Teacher Prep Review," National Council on Teacher Quality, June 2013].
I check NCTQ's end notes on their remarkable equation of "learning styles" with "pseudo science" and find NCTQ cites this 2008 lit review:
...our search of the learning-styles literature has revealed only a few fragmentary and unconvincing pieces of evidence that meet this standard, and we therefore conclude that
the literature fails to provide adequate support for applying learning-style assessments in school settings. Moreover, several studies that used appropriate research designs found evidence that contradicted the learning-styles hypothesis (Massa & Mayer, 2006; Constantinidou & Baker, 2002). Finally, even if a study of a particular learning-style classification and its corresponding instructional methods was to reveal the necessary evidence, such a finding would provide support for that particular learning-style classification only—and only then if its benefits surpass the high costs of student assessments and tailored instruction [Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork, "Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence," Psychological Science in the Public Interest, December 2008, p. 116].
Another psychologist agrees:
Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it's a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it's presented [Patti Neighmond, "Think You're an Auditory or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely," NPR: Shots, 2011.08.29].
If these psychologists are right, it could be a great relief for us teachers. One teacher in a room of 20 or 30 students can individualize instruction only so far. When you're giving your all to one student or one group of students, you're probably not giving much to the rest. Even if we all have preferences for learning certain ways, I would think we teachers have an obligation to help students learn in as many ways possible; after all, you may prefer to learn by doing things with your hands, but life won't always be nice and give you a supervisor and co-workers who will train you with hands-on activities. Your boss may hand you a manual, say "Read it," and expect you to be ready to do what the manual says the next day.
So what do you think, fellow educators? Are we ready to challenge our bosses and ask that differentiating instruction for learning styles be stricken from our teacher evaluations until someone produces evidence that such differentiation makes a difference?
One of the concerns about the NCTQ is that it seems to be just the latest style in teacher bashing. Its reductive condemnations seem more the agenda-driven musings of an ideological cult than the conclusions of careful and industrious scholars. Its quickly reduction of the idea of teaching to learning modes to pseudo-science is an example of why this outfit must be approached with caution.
As a teacher of writing and, particularly rhetoric, I know that different psychological structures have been considered in developing argumentative prose since, at least, the time of Aristotle. Some people, we note from their writing efforts, are deductive thinkers who reason from the general to the particular and others are inductive thinkers who reason from the particular to the general, and most slide all over the place on the scale of reasoning. Our task is to help students recognize and apply their individual modes of thought and become disciplined learners. There are other patterns of cognition, too, such as people who are visual thinkers who think through images, and some who tend toward abstraction and formulas. The matter has not been really one of teaching to the style as much as recognizing the modes of learning and showing students that there are many pathways to the same goal.
Those glib and reductive citations used by NCTQ are suspect in that they do not acknowledge the thousands of years of thought and writing about the processes of human thought. We may well be confronting another one of those astounding failures of scholarship that undermines not only education but the basis on which our cultures have been formed.
If you can make things hands on that relate to real life, you'll educate the kids far more than if you feel forced to teach to a test.
Like everything, learning styles might be overanalyzed, but my experience is that most people have various preferred ways to learn.
One of the important assessments we need when approaching developing jobs for brain injured or developmentally disabled clients is how a person best learns new tasks. Many folks just can't remember information/instructions presented in a lecture form, or even short (4-7 step directions). We have to use simple checklists, some with pictures. Others need demonstrations upon which they model their own activity. Others may need oral cuing while doing various tasks.
Most adults with normal brain function, and many without, can tell you how they prefer to learn new tasks. Most children up until high school age probably can't, so the teacher has to take this into consideration.
I'm not sure the Pashler et al. 2008 lit review is glib and reductive, David. And I don't think we bash teachers by pointing out that teacher training programs fail to offer coherent, evidence-based training in planning lessons.
Donald, the research agrees that people do indeed prefer different ways to learn. What's missing is any empirical proof that differentiating instruction according to those preferences produces better educational outcomes than delivering the same quality teaching to all students. The researchers above aren't saying that we shouldn't look for different ways to reach different students. You can still do oral cuing one moment, then switch to a visual approach, but instead of targeting separate groups, you can deliver both methods to everyone and reinforce everyone's learning.
I was referring to the conclusion that NCTQ drew from its citation of Pashler et al and other studies, not the studies themselves. However, I am not defending teacher education programs. As with most subject area professors, I find much about them that is merely academic clutter. But anytime people or organizations get ranked on a scale of worth (the old question of the pitfalls of grading) as some definitive mark of value, the motives and methods must be questioned. I don't think branding major universities as if they are grades of meat can possibly do much to improve education programs. The NCTQ needs to defend its tactic and the information and reasoning on which it is based.
I side with your comment above to Donald. But in the reviews of the literature, there is little attention paid to psycho-linguistics. I find it troubling that there seems to be no mention of (Dare I bring this name up?) Chomsky and the debate about learning and information acquisition that he has spawned.
I do not find the NCTQ approach to criticizing teacher education programs helpful or informing.
The Washington Post was one of the first news media to give a full report on the NCTQ rankings. It followed up with a series of criticisms of the rankings under the headline “Why the NCTQ teacher prep ratings are nonsense.”
It noted that "The council, which was founded in 2000 by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and is funded by organizations that promote a corporate-influenced school reform agenda..."
One of the major criticisms came from Linda Darling-Hammond, chair of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University. She wrote:
"The field’s concerns were reinforced last month when NCTQ published ratings of states’ teacher education policies which bore no relationship to the quality of their training systems or to their outcomes as measured by student achievement. In this study, the highest-achieving states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — including Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New Jersey, and Minnesota — all got grades of C or D, while low-achieving Alabama got the top rating from NCTQ. It is difficult to trust ratings that are based on criteria showing no relationship to successful teaching and learning."
Here is the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/18/why-the-nctq-teacher-prep-ratings-are-nonsense/
Ah! Good link, David!