Learning styles are unique as each individual person. They vary as much as people do. Each person’s learning style is different and trying to group them into a few groups is like trying to gather cattle into pens by color. We have a brown pen, a white pen, a black pen and a red pen. Where do the black and white cows or the red and white cows go? How about the cream colored ones? OOPs this one is all black with a white head; do we chop off the head and put it in one pen and the rest of the carcass in another pen?
We should not worry as much as to what the learning style is and commence with the actual education of the student. If you spread your teaching out to an even delivery of the basic three main sensory receivers: Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic, you have placed the information to the student in a manner that they can digest in whichever manner they choose. You must follow-up with the student and see how they present the training after consumption of the information and processed it in their individual manner. If the output does not match the desired results, then further investigation needs to be done to see how the desired results can be achieved.
Each cow eats hay and produces milk. The quality and quantity varies from each animal, but the process is the same. This is true for peoples learning as well. Everyone consumes the information that is delivered, and they process it. How they use the information is what we seek. Some information may need to be more visually tilted while other may require more hands on skills to obtain the desired results, but that is minor adjustments that need to be made.
Reading all of these learning styles and supporting information is interesting, but each one is trying to support their own theories and none encompass everyone. I feel like I am a little of each and none of any one in particular, and like stated in the assigned blog reading “Stahl believes that many of the studies supporting learning style theory are not based on reliable study”. Let’s stop worrying about how people learn and start teaching people.
Nice, so students are like cows.... (smile) My understanding is we feed cows differently for different uses. Grain before slaughter, and "sweet grass" for milk cows. So there is some distinction...
ReplyDelete(smile)
I think we see eye to eye on this, Ron. The important thing is that you teach what is needed in the way IT needs to be taught. I thought about language pronunciation as an example. If you're a visual learner, can I merely explain with some pictures how a word is to be pronounced? I'd have a hard time doing that, and you'd have a hard time understanding it too. Most likely if you didn't know how to say "chicken", I wouldn't be able to teach you how to say it by mouthing the word over and over, the "ch" sound alone looks too much like too many other sounds that are made in the English language...the most effective way is to have you listen to the word, and then have you practice making the same sounds. That's my opinion on it anyway.
ReplyDeleteLeonard,
ReplyDeleteI was not trying to say students were like cattle, I was trying to point out that grouping students together in learning styles was like grouping cows together by color. You could use any animal in the analogy, cats, dogs, mice, rats, whichever works, but not every person fits into every category and no category is exactly the right fit for any one person.
Jared,
I agree with you, you have to teach the subject the way it needs taught sometimes. Your word pronunciation was an excellent example supporting your thoughts. You could also point out that you could not teach a tactile person how to feel a chicken and pronounce it correctly also. In other examples it is easy to be shown several different ways of doing something though. So it is a double edged sword.
Ron