This page will be dedicated to providing an alternative view to what passes for education, and Initial Teacher Training (ITT)

Posted 3/7/10

First of all then, it's probably a good idea to state what I mean by education as a basic premise, and I think it's easier to define it by stating what it is not, or shouldn't be.

Education is not:

skills acquisition

training

nor qualification accumulation.

Here, you would probably say, actually, I've looked at the education system, and it is in fact all of those things.

Let me qualify, those statements.  Education, as a term, has been usurped to mean those things.  Education has been appropriated by business to create a new way of thinking, in which we have (along with many other things) come to believe that that is what education should be i.e. the things we need for work!

Education in its rawest term, means; the development of the abilities of the mind (learning to know). 

Learning then, for learning's sake. 

Now, while this Liberal definition will do for now, it leads nicely on to other things I want to talk about on this page, which are; the problems, with education and ITT programmes, and from these problems, stem many of the issues that blight our "education" (I'm going to call it training from here on) system. 

One of these is the thorny issue of Learning Styles (LS).  A learning style is that property, we are told, we either inherently possess, or train ourselves in, in order to enable ourselves to learn, or when we allow others to teach us.  The model we are most familiar with in the UK is the contradiction that is the Aural, Kinaesthetic, Visual learner.  This is were, it is purported that many of us have a bias toward one or the other of these ways of learning (or being taught).  You can do these tests online.  Here is a random one I selected when I typed in Learning Styles Assessment. 

Cut and paste

http://www.ldpride.net/learning-style-test.html

Here is what this site says about LS.

WHAT'S YOUR LEARNING STYLE?

Everybody has a preferred learning style.  Knowing and understanding our learning style helps us to learn more effectively.  This is particularly true for LD/AD (H) D people because of their different ways of learning.  Through identifying your learning style, you will be able to capitalize on your strengths and improve your self-advocacy skills.

Examine these words carefully (an opportunity to build on your thinking skills).  To suggest everyone has a preference, and that that preference is somehow the key to unlocking your potential, is to demean, or simply misunderstand, the nature of what it is you are describing.  So, I prefer gritty, British Realism in films to Rom-Coms.  I prefer bitter to lager, red wine to white, coffee to tea, but the preference toward these does not exclude me having a preference for the others in different contexts.  E.g. if I was at a party and all the bitter had gone, trust me, I'd be straight into the fridge and drinking the host's lager.  My preference you might argue would have stayed the same (I prefer bitter) but my ability to adapt to the situation, the context, would have changed, and I would now prefer to drink lager, than have nothing to drink.  This makes the whole concept relational.  Now, this is not true for everybody, and there are those out there who would say, I'd rather drink dishwater, that drink say, Carling (it's hard to argue against that) but my point is that your preference will have changed, as the context changes.  You've now run out of your favoured drink and prefer to drink nothing (or dishwater) rather than another alternative (don't forget, drinking nothing is an alternative).  Preference therefore is transient, it can and often does, change.

It is these relationships that are in fact how we learn (i.e. if we didn't take enough beer we can drink someone else's, that's not learnt through a "style", I make the meaning through my experience of having been to parties before) and not through some professed preference, and that if someone else does not cater to my preference, they are failing me! 

This is the stick that is used to beat individual teachers with.  Later on in this series, I'll give better examples of sticks that teachers should be beaten with i.e.

bland acceptance of the status quo

inability to question the simplest of concepts

reading the Daily Mail, etc.

Here is an example taken from James Atherton's excellent (although still challengeable) site http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/contents.htm of why individual teachers should not and cannot be responsible for individual’s LS.  But for now, the idea that someone else should be responsible for your learning should be anathema to teachers, who should be saying this burden of responsibility is not mine, I am here to facilitate learning, but more on this later.

Learning Styles don’t matter

There is a vast amount of current, sometimes contradictory, literature on "learning styles".  What are you going to do with it?  So some people are holists and some serialists, some activists, reflectors, theorists or pragmatists, some visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners.  And some are bright and some just plain thick.  So what?

In this class there is a serialist pragmatist kinaesthetic learner (who is also field-dependent, not to mention his MBTI) primarily a convergent thinker, high on logico-mathematical intelligence but low on linguistic intelligence, sitting next to a holist, reflector, primarily visual and field-independent... who is also chronically shy (no-one mentions that).  Even assuming that such things can be assessed with some validity and reliability, which is itself far from clear — what are you going to do about it?  There are after all thirty other students in the class, each of whom could be described in similar terms.  And two-thirds of them are female, and one-third male (two of whom are gay).  Five of the class are from ethnic minorities, two are dyslexic, one is visually impaired, and three are clinically depressed (although only one of them knows it).  Six are "mature" students — at least, they are chronologically over 25.

In other words, a fairly typical class, composed of people.  (One of them has his Yorkshire terrier in a holdall, but perhaps we can ignore that.)  You, of course are...

Some of the students are really keen on the subject; some decided after three weeks that they had made a wrong choice, but it was too late to change.  Some are here because it is a required course.

All the theory tells you to value these students equally.  All learning styles are valid and to be respected.  No-one must be disadvantaged: the only quality you can disparage is the notorious surface learner who must be won over.

You are all different.  You already know this, of course, on a less than formal basis.  You recognise that when one student pipes up with, "Can I just ask a question...?" you can expect something really stupid and irrelevant, and that when another starts the same way it will really put you on the spot.  Some will make notes even of your jokes, and some will relish the little exercises you set up to break up your presentation, while others will whinge that you are holding back on the correct answers.

Can you cope with all this information?  Can you even imagine how you might adapt your teaching to suit each of this bunch?  How many times might you have to re-cast a point to make sure it connected with all these minds? And how many of them would switch off each time you repeated it?

Of course, if you have the luxury of working with a small group of learners, you may very well tailor your teaching style to address their particular preferences — but you will know those preferences as part of your wider and deeper knowledge of them as people (probably) and not through superficial testing mechanisms which seek to force them into pre-determined pigeon-holes.

Or, if you were devising a resource-based learning programme to go out to thousands of learners (as the Open University does), it might — perhaps — be reasonable to produce different versions for all the claimed learning styles. But this is the real world, and real time. Learning styles theory is an academic luxury: the students not only have rights but also responsibilities. You can't tune in to all of them, so they have to tune in to you.

Moreover, as the page on supporting students will argue, pandering to learning styles may be doing the students a disservice: they will benefit more from adapting and becoming versatile, more able to respond both to formal teaching and learning from experience, than they will from having everything made as easy as possible for them in your particular subject.

There is another argument too and that is, not only can you not practicably cater for everyone, but that like a lot of teacherly buzz words, LS do not even exist, or are just bullshit (e-learning, active learning, etc).  The reason; using our eyes, ears, or hands to do things, is not actually how we learn, this is not how the brain works.  We make meaning by drawing on the relationship between what you know already exists, and the new concept you are attempting to learn.

For example, if you are learning something new about the second World War, you take everything you already know about WWII and make sense of the new thing based on the contexts that already exist for you.  It does not matter, how you assimilated this information, Visually, aurally, or kinaesthetically, or all three, none of them will help you learn per se, they are not the vehicle by which learning travels, if a context or relationship for WWII does not exist. 

Learning Styles Don't Exist!

Now I don't agree with everything Daniel says, but his general message is correct.  Fior instance, I don't believe the image is that of Algeria, in fact I know it isn't, Algeria is up and to the left.  Not taking things for granted see!

Another thing is, Daniel's acceptance of why learning styles are used i.e. because students believe them, is naiive.  He has missed a link in the chain, how do students come to believe this nonsense?  Because we teach it to them on ITT programmes, where did we get it from?  From government agendas and research that does not include teachers or those in education, it includes policy makers and poiticians, whose only credentials for this are a lust for power.  It does not take into account the "Hidden Curriculum", more on this in the future.  I have included a pdf here from research conducted by the Learning and Skills Council by Professor Coffield, for those of you new to this, the amount of models for learning styles alone is cause for disbelief in its efficacy.