Weirdo Teacher 05: The Story of the Myth of Learning Styles

How a faux-corporate system ruins good, simple ideas

Apr 05, 2022

When I wrote for the Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario (LDAO), in addition to writing some books, I also wrote/put together materials about learning and learning disabilities (LDs) that would be shared with schools. I’m not un-proud of that stuff – I shared some of it in the last Weirdo Teacher post – but one was a strangely contentious one-pager for little kids called “How Do I Learn?”

In it I shared a framework that included the notion of “learning styles.” Of the many things you can tell kids to empower them, the fact that we do not all learn the same way is a big one. One of the first things that scare children is the idea that there is a system they do not fit in or are not worthy of being part of. And since kids go to schools where things are largely presented in certain modes (via text, in pieces that only eventually add up to a big picture), a large number of children receive that scary message all day long.

Step one to solving this problem, in my view, is to let them know that they’re not insane or dumb, that a method of presentation is being used that might not suit people like them – and it’s not their fault. So I always teach that learning happens in a bunch of modes – hearing, reading, watching, trying, etc. – and that part of becoming a successful learner is finding, with help, the modes that work for you. It’s an easy and helpful idea. I included it in the books I wrote, too. But it turns out that in a certain context, it is a controversial idea. Fake news!

Screen Shot 2022-04-02 at 10.48.41 AM — “Learning styles” can include how you like the light, temperature, social situation, physical position, etc. while you’re learning, as well as mode.

A Trip to the Researcher

My LDAO colleague/boss and I walked this one-sheeter over to Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto to run it by a researcher (the only time we did that). The researcher looked at it, then stared at me with dripping disdain and said to my boss: “Learning styles? Really?” I don’t remember the rest of the meeting; it was embarrassing and reminded me of grade school: I’d done something wrong and was an asshole again. (We put the one-sheeter out anyway, so I don’t know what the meeting was for.) I didn’t know, because I do not live in an academic realm, that the research somehow says that learning styles definitely don’t exist. But I knew they do: it didn’t and doesn’t make sense to deny it. I did not stop sharing the idea when I returned to the classroom, and I never found it to be at odds with my teaching practice.

Much more recently, a friend of A Different Fish shared an article from The Atlantic called “The Myth of ‘Learning Styles,’” and I bookmarked it but I didn’t get to read it until recently. In order to respond to it properly, I needed to write the previous four Weirdo Teacher articles, and now, thousands of words later, here we are.

The Myth of Learning Styles

The article in The Atlantic tells this story: in the long-ago years of the 1990s, Neil Fleming was a classroom inspector puzzled by his observation that “only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students.” This does not seem like any keen insight to me, but if someone had to be the first to point it out, good.

Fleming came up with a questionnaire (the VARK test) meant to help kids investigate their learning profile. The test took off and got used very widely in that all-in, “super-excited about the new silver bullet” way that educators are prone to adopt. It’s a good thing that teachers take up new ideas eagerly – more people should try it – but subtlety and nuance fall away. That’s also okay, but the over-eager, over-zealous desire to over-believe in (and then mandate or encode) ideas or tools is a sucky aspect of the situation.

A silver bullet is also a great money maker, to boot: the VARK test and spin-off books and materials and conferences and consultations became financially and professionally lucrative. Education money is a big catch. Then, due to these new associated expenses, people finally began to inspect and interrogate the idea and they were kind of mad when it turned out not to be a silver bullet at all! God dang it! My tax dollars! And ta-da, now the idea is “bunk.”

It is in everyone’s interests for educational research and resources – time, money, effort, to be directed toward those educational interventions which demonstrably improve student learning, and away from those which do not.
https://www.thecut.com/2015/12/one-reason-the-learning-styles-myth-persists.html

Education Is Fuzzy

I think a key reason that education is prone to its worse tendencies (like shallow examination, over-trust in fads, inertia, burnout) is that teachers are set upon by so many forces: they’re overburdened, underfunded, disrespected but essential, pinched and pushed. That’s not a group who generally has time for philosophical conversations: “Will it work?” is what they think. Will it solve my problems? Will it help? Good: gimme. I used to say teachers and cops had a lot in common (both professions attract both helpers and sadists, they’re the authority white people can yell at, they’re jobs little kids play at), but lately it’s feeling more like teachers and nurses. Both are nurturing, social professions run by financially oriented, asocial supervisors; both are underpaid and disrespected; both are intimate and crucial; both involve things we grew up having our mothers do.

Education is a human activity that is at essence fuzzy and loving, long-forced to put on faux-corporate airs (all those standardized tests, reports, rankings, inspectors, etc.) by brittle, suspicious government systems. A big part of the educational system is a management bureaucracy that sucks money, talent, and energy out of the profession. If it were legitimately helpful, it would bolster classroom efforts, and not keep seeking magic-bullet ways to make it all more efficient – which is how it treated and implemented “learning styles.”

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Fleming knows what I’m talking about. In his own article Learning Styles Again: VARKing up the right tree! (with David Baum), he makes it really clear:

Students and teachers need a starting place for thinking about, and understanding, how they learn. Self-knowledge is a good start. How to get that self-knowledge? Inventories can be useful. Initially, it doesn't much matter which inventory we use. Why not? Because a learning style is not a set of scores on some inventory, or a set of alphabetic symbols, or paragraphs of descriptors with labels. A learning style is, rather, a description of a process, or of preferences. Any inventory that encourages a learner to think about the way that he or she learns is a useful step towards understanding, and hence improving, learning.

Fleming openly owns that the notion is meant as a conversation starter. He states clearly that the things identified in his questionnaire are only are an aspect of learning. He’s on the level, in my opinion, and correct. The basic idea was solid. It was good.

Fact: Mean People Suck

Experts aren’t sure how the concept spread, but it might have had something to do with the self-esteem movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Everyone was special – so everyone must have a special learning style too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/557687/

This off-handed quip, from The Atlantic piece, is a very common, cynical take on the self-esteem notion. People who don’t understand or believe in the fuzzy love part of education (and life) like to slag the possible over-correction of the self-esteem movement – but that (again) is not because the idea sucked. If the self-esteem movement was reduced to being about endless praise, that was a bastardization of a better idea: that everybody matters. Nobody is trash. It wasn’t initially suggested as a way to make rich white kids softer, but that seems to be the angry take on the result... I happen to really like these young people and their self-worth, and don’t see them as more broken than my generation, where kids were just around. The idea that self-esteem mattered was gold, and it was not implemented widely or fairly (see a pattern?).

The same cynics will try and point to Mister Rogers as a villain who made ‘Murica soft (or something – does it feel soft to you? As Robbie Fulks sang, America’s a hard religion). The cynics are thrilled by their hip and edgy take, and they get a lot of Oh haw haw haw back-patting from each other about it, but the facade is so transparent that it’s sad. They’re contorted and confused if they can see a good, kind man who loved kids and stuck up for kids as a villain.

I challenge anyone to find me a child who doesn’t need love. Then find me an unbroken person who got what he/she/they needed as a child who can act like a monster. People need love like plants need water, and people who don’t receive it sadly pass their deficits on to those they impact, until nobody can see straight after a few generations, nobody can figure out why they’re so damn mad and screwed up. Hurt people hurt people. Meanness is learned. Love is natural. For one thing.

For another: Everybody is special. That’s just a quick way of saying, “If you look for it, people have things to offer.” But we’re ham-fisted dopes, and the idea seems to have been taken up incorrectly, unsubtly, without wisdom. “Everybody is special” doesn’t mean everyone is an all star athlete or a great singer – of course it doesn’t. Everybody has something to offer the world, and everybody has a right to dignity. If the first is encouraged, and the second is respected, then really wonderful things happen that make people feel fucking great.

Instead, the legend goes, people decided to label all children Track Stars and gave all of the spoiled, lucky little bastards participation medals and then the kids all apparently thought they were the fastest person on Earth. If that was true, it was dumb – and does not disprove the idea that everyone is special.

Those loud, sneering voices laugh at Mister Rogers for being too loving, too gentle. This fits nicely with the other bizarro-takes from the mean side of the culture war: it’s bad to be “woke,” and weak to be a social justice warrior. My whole life those boneheads have been calling me too “sensitive.” The opposites of those are, for the record, “asleep,” “bystander,” and “insensitive.”

Fuzzy Tools Are Good

When I share the idea that some people learn best in a mode that isn’t always offered, I am definitely NOT contending that all people have a preferred learning style and must be taught in the modality identified by the VARK test.

I’m saying: keep an eye out for this possibility as you teach. This is one way to examine a learner when making decisions about the presentation of information. This might help somebody.

There are different styles of presenting information, and different ways of receiving information, and the fit between those matters. For some people it matters quite a bit. Keep it in mind as you go about teaching and learning and you will see it. This isn’t a prescriptive model - it’s just a tool you can consider using. You don’t need to then only deliver information in any specific way; people are complicated, and there could be a million reasons that that approach worked on that day.

The OISE researcher, the education industry, and The Atlantic’s journalist are all making one mistake: they’re looking for the one thing that will help everybody, when teaching well is about helping everybody find their thing.

A Different Fish