Learning Styles

Debates about “learning styles” crop up from time to time in the ELT blogosphere, and the subject elicits very strong reactions across the board. (Here for example.)

I’m starting to get into the very bad habit of commenting on threads that have long since lain dormant. I’m not going to do that this time and instead post my thoughts here.

Although in the above referenced discussion there are a number of very cogent, very erudite responses, I find it interesting that two issues which seem obvious to me weren’t really addressed by anyone: a) students at the margins, and b) the conflation of methods with outcomes.

Taking these in reverse order, is the fact current methods for implementing them in classrooms can’t be proven to be very effective an indictment of the principle of learning styles? (The conclusion a lot of the commenters in the referenced thread seem to make.) Or is it possible that at the moment we’re just not very good at it, or that the currently utilized frameworks aren’t adequate, or that we just don’t have our educational spaces organized in the ways needed to effectively support genuinely individualized learning? Instead of asserting that learning styles represent a “dead-end,” maybe what we should be looking are the basic assumptions of how education is organized, including whether or not there are better models than the traditional classroom paradigm. Maybe?

The traditional classroom model is designed to organize educational spaces for majorities. It endures for precisely the same reason. That a student is a “visual” learner may or may not be a valid excuse for doing poorly on a given test, but isn’t it worth asking, say on a vocabulary test, whether or not the form of the assessment is more testing mastery of the form itself and not the underlying understanding of the meanings of the words? If the form of something we do truly creates access barriers for a student, shouldn’t we try to do something about it?

It’s very easy to understand how being blind, deaf or suffering from cerebral palsy create educational barriers and need accomodation, but there are also any number of other conditions or circumstances that also create profound impediments to learning that may not be immediately obvious to the teacher. The pernicious thing about marginalization of any kind is it’s a process of invisibility and silence, especially if no one in a position to do something about it is looking at or thinking about the issue.

How do you really know if a given performance/result by a student is a lack of effort or in fact something else, if you don’t ask the question in the first place?