That’s the question veteran California middle school teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron asks at her tweenteacher blog. Her point is that as a practical matter, well, it doesn’t matter. Research notwithstanding, her experience tells her that this student focuses better when she’s teaching with the Interactive Board. That one “phases out when we’re reading, but as long as someone’s talking about the material, she’s in.”

When people get all up at arms about this research or that research being unsupported, I beg them to remember: some teachers must learn how NOT to be boring.…So providing the theory that there are different learning styles, and categorizing those learners, helps those teachers to remember what they are charged to do: teach ALL students. So why diss any theory that helps build a ladder up from our current descent into standardization? It seems to me that we aren’t doing students a disservice by thinking of themselves as individuals as long as we’re also preparing them for the shared world we live in.

In short, Heather’s argument seems to boil down to this: Learning styles may be a myth, but it’s a harmless myth, since it encourages teachers to be inventive, creative and place a premium on engaging students. That’s a reasonable, commonsense take that may help teachers today. But ultimately it risks doing a disservice to the profession.

A few centuries ago, doctors thought malaria was caused by “bad air,” which was associated with swamps. Drain the swamps and the disease seemed to go away. Of course, we later learned it had nothing to do with bad air. Malaria is carried by mosquitoes. When you drain the swamp, it’s not the bad air that goes away, it’s the mosquitoes. It’s unlikely we would say “so what” as long as the malaria goes away. Understanding why something works is fundamental knowledge. It also provides a provable or disprovable hypothesis, which is critical as we try to understand teacher effectiveness. Suppose our 19th century scientists came to believe that in draining the swamps, it’s not the bad air, but the standing water that causes malaria. Quick, no more bathing! You’ll catch malaria! The problem with a half truth, as has often been observed, is that you might be holding on to the wrong half.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is not necessarily benign. On my second day of teacher training I was taught that it was our responsibility to determine each students learning style (by means of a questionnaire) and differentiate lessons to accommodate each. My time would have been better spent — and my students better served — if I had focused on ways to make material come alive in my classroom. More recently, Jay Mathews published a teacher’s evaluation where a veteran teacher was dinged for, among other things, not accommodating different learning styles during his observation–a real-world consequence of junk science. Perhaps we should also hold teachers accountable for reading their students’ auras before beginning a lesson. After all, if it helps teachers to consider the whole child, where’s the harm?

It’s easy to say “no big deal,” but it is a big deal when unproven theories and junk science robs time from good practice, becomes a time-wasting hoop to jump through, or damages a teacher’s career. Not understanding why something works but doing it anyway is a prime example of cargo cult education. Sure, if doctors were amputating gangrenous limbs to cut out evil spirits and offering the severed limbs as a sacrifice to the Gods, it would clearly be better than leaving the limb alone. But medicine, like all bodies of accumulated knowledge, advances by not by learning that something works, but why it works. Teaching should do the same.

15 Comments »

As a parent, I’ve talked with other parents who have blamed the teacher for their child’s poor grade because the teacher wasn’t teaching to their child’s learning style. It definitely has the potential for becoming another excuse for poor behavior and bad grades.

Comment by Gina — December 21, 2009 @ 9:53 am
Dan Willingham does say that some people have better visual or auditory memory than others. To say “learning styles are bunk,” is not to imply that all learners are equally good at learning things in all ways.

Learning styles theory, however, says that certain people will always learn things better in the way that matches their learning style–so a teacher should tend to each student’s learning style when teaching any topic. Now that is bunk.

Yes, there will be students who are especially alert to sounds and speech, or who remember sounds and speech especially well. But this does not mean the teacher should always include sounds and speech to involve these students. Most lessons will involve both images and speech. Yet there are times when students need to learn by listening alone, and times when they need to learn by watching or reading alone. All students should learn to do this. And teachers should not be obligated to use “manipulatives” when there is no need for them. Kids often regard them as toys.

If I were teaching a unit on the Renaissance, I might include a lesson on Renaissance dance. Time permitting, I might have the class try one of the simpler dances–not because this would help the kinesthetic learner understand the Renaissance (or history in general) better, but because it would help all students understand this particular aspect of the Renaissance better.

Comment by Diana Senechal — December 21, 2009 @ 10:21 am
For the first time I sense a hint of anger and disbelief in your writing Robert, and it is well deserved. For a bunch of educators who want to teach more and more critical thinking, it is scary that we are not capable of criticizing and analyzing our own thinking and beliefs about teaching in light of new evidence.

Comment by Matt — December 21, 2009 @ 10:28 am
I also meant to say that yes, the research does matter–precisely because there is usually more to the research than the summaries or one-line conclusions convey. The statement “learning styles are bunk” could be misconstrued, just as the idea of learning styles has been taken to absurdities.

Comment by Anonymous — December 21, 2009 @ 10:31 am
I also meant to say: yes, teachers should pay attention to the research. It is often subtler than one-line summaries may suggest. The statement “learning styles are bunk” could easily be misconstrued. It is important to look at what this means and does not mean.

Usually, because of time constraints, teachers and schools rely on one-line summaries of research. That’s where the problems come in. How many times have I heard that “research has shown” that students learn better in cooperative groups? When I looked at the research itself, I found a much more complex picture.

Comment by Diana Senechal — December 21, 2009 @ 10:43 am
That one “phases out when we’re reading…”

Why is that one “phasing out”? Could it be because that one hasn’t the ability to decode the text or comprehend it because of lack of prior knowledge? It would certainly be easier to chalk up that one’s “phasing out” to “learning style” than to actually find out what is the possible problem.
And, did Heather Wolpert-Gawron actually read the study before deciding there was nothing in it of any import? I would genuinely like to know.

Comment by TM Willemse — December 21, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
Here is a Willingham gem: the brain is designed not to help us think, but rather to help us avoid thinking. That makes my desire to get his book a ‘no brainer’. Willingham also blogs at

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/author/dwillingham

Comment by andrei radulescu-banu — December 21, 2009 @ 1:11 pm
What a lively debate!It might surprise you all to know that I’m not debunking the debunking, as it were. But the fact is that I read all new research with a grain of salt, as I believe every teacher should. The fads and trends in education can bog us all down if we don’t just use our own heads every once and a while. I’m not putting down this evidence just as I’m not putting down the evidence that it exists. I use it all in my own teaching practice. But the research I do with each group of students that are given me each year means as much to me and guiding my practice as the studies by those in the hallowed towers of academia. I never decided hat “there was nothing of any import.” Rather, I find it all has a degree of importance. I add their research to mine, and viola!, I find the mix that works for the individuals before me at any given time. Thanks to everyone for the discussion and the input.

Take care, and happy holidays to all!
-Heather Wolpert-Gawron aka Tweenteacher

Comment by Heather Wolpert-Gawron — December 21, 2009 @ 1:23 pm
“…risks doing a disservice to the profession” indeed, Robert. And, as such explaining-aways are informing practice all over the profession, the profession is poorly serving its clientele (students, hence society/culture).

Though using an Interactive Board as an instructional aid is indeed a powerful innovation that can make material come alive, as Robert suggests, the scariest part of Wolpert-Gawron’s thinking is the idea that, when it comes to learning a given piece of information, each child’s preferred method of information-reception is as valuable and fruitful as the next. For reasons like, “Kids pay more attention when I use this thing”, technologies like Interactive Boards are emerging as substitutes for reading in Wolpert-Gawron’s world, just as watching movie versions of great literary works are often supplanting actually reading the works all over Education.

This path of least resistance regarding reading–Education’s responding to kids reading less by assigning less reading and choosing to find non-reading ways around it–is a lot like a snake eating its own tail to live. It should be no surprise that nearly 40% of students need remedial coursework once they get to the reading-heavy environment of postsecondary ed, as so many students spend their pre-college educations preparing by watching videos.

Until something does actually step up to replace the printed word as the most efficient, most-used delivery mechanism for complex information, schools who find ways around reading when their kids show the slightest signs of not being “engaged” are letting those kids–and later, all of us–down.

Comment by Eric Kalenze — December 21, 2009 @ 1:37 pm
I have been researching learning styles too and frankly, unlike a number of my colleagues, my own observations in my classroom agree with folks like Willingham that learning styles don’t exist. I think Heather has a point that we have to work on our own craft of teaching and something that gives teachers the framework for doing that is probably a good thing. There IS a way that learning styles can be a problem: we we convince students that they can’t learn in other “styles.” For example, I have had students tell me that they can’t listen to a lecture, write an essay or other standard assignment because another, well-meaning teacher, labeled that student as a “hands-on learner” or as having a “hands-on learning style.” I have usually thought that it was a fairly meaningless concept but worse, a lot of impressionable students use that as an excuse or crutch for not learning in challenging learning environments. That’s the harm, in my opinion…

Comment by Jason — December 21, 2009 @ 3:05 pm
“…the scariest part of Wolpert-Gawron’s thinking is the idea that, when it comes to learning a given piece of information, each child’s preferred method of information-reception is as valuable and fruitful as the next. For reasons like, “Kids pay more attention when I use this thing”, technologies like Interactive Boards are emerging as substitutes for reading in Wolpert-Gawron’s world, just as watching movie versions of great literary works are often supplanting actually reading the works all over Education.”

It is exactly that which worries me: teachers’ insistence that they “know how the student learns best” by what they see the student enjoy the most. Observation alone isn’t a reliable determiner of student ability. At best it leads to false conclusions, at worst it pigeon-holes students based on the teacher’s unsupported assumptions.

Does the debunking of learning styles matter in teaching? Of course it does, and it should. When something that has, for years, driven curriculum development, teacher training, lesson planning, and teacher evaluation turns out to be incorrect or, at the very least, extremely poorly supported it should raise all kinds of alarms and red flags.

Comment by redkudu — December 21, 2009 @ 4:32 pm
Many social science research studies I’ve encountered will commence with a phrase such as, “A review of the literature suggests…” And that’s exactly what I’ve discovered after reading the intricacies of the study. They could be suggesting “x” and “y” but if you read the study carefully, that may not necessarily be the case.

Also, for a great deal of the research that exists in a field like education, it’s not a bit uncommon to find contradictory findings on the same topic from a different researcher.

This is exactly how people like Alfie Kohn survive. People like this need to be taken with a grain of salt and are notorious for finding some obscure research from some fly-by-night think tank simply to validate their argument.

Be careful what you read into your reading. It can become problematic.

Comment by Paul Hoss — December 21, 2009 @ 5:07 pm
Well said Robert.

Comment by GGW — December 21, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
There tends to be a none-too-subtle racism implicit in a lot of the “learning styles” enthusiasm. My district is very keen on labeling students according to “learning styles” and I notice that black kids are usually pegged as “kinesthetic learners,” Asian kids as “visual learners” and so forth. If this were merely an idle exercise, it would not be so bad, but it tends to constrict people’s thinking — even the student’s. If a child truly believes s/he is a “kinesthetic learner,” well, s/he had better abandon plans to do Algebra, trig, calculus, foreign languages — better stick to machine shop and landscaping. There is a real risk of narrowing children’s self-perception, as well as their educational experiences.

I think there is a confusion between “teaching to different learning styles” and simply teaching for engagement. Different strategies and activities are called for in all subjects in order to keep interest high and students engaged — that is a reality unrelated to fictitious “learning styles.”

We do not permit students to be labeled “LD” or “developmentally delayed” without a valud assessment by a competent professional. Teachers are not experts in “learning styles” and rarely use any validated learning style assessments, nor do they usually have data on what type of learning activity actually boosts an individual student’s achievement (as opposed to his interest, which is not the same thing).

There’s a real ethical issue here in labeling students based on nothing more than a teacher’s opinion.

Comment by palisadesk — December 21, 2009 @ 7:55 pm
“Studying Young Minds, And How To Teach Them” in yesterday’s New York Times is a case in point. Cognitive neuroscience being the new buzz word in educational research. Some relatively provocative findings?

Comment by Paul Hoss — December 22, 2009 @ 7:02 am