Sometimes teachers get excited about Energy Theater because they feel it addresses the needs of "kinesthetic learners." The idea that teachers should provide instructional activities that serve a variety of learning styles is popular, but recent research (summarized nicely by sciencegeekgirl) indicates that your measured learning style mainly tells you whether you like a certain kind of activity more, not whether you learn more from it. Embodied cognition suggests that we are probably all more "kinesthetic learners" than we have tended to admit.
The Onion spoof whose title I pillaged is savagely funny.
Rachel, thank you so much for sharing this! I really had a blast reading Stephanie's article and some of the sources. Right now, I have so many thoughts flying around in my head, and I would like to share some of them (as you know, I am an "external thinker" ;-) )
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I have heard lectures about learning styles and that we as teachers have to vary teaching methods to adapt to those learning styles. I recognized quite a few theories presented in Willingham's video... On the other hand, I also was taught that different contents might require different teaching methods, that some things are best taught by lecture, others by hands-on experimentation, and so on.
Although I've heard both arguments for the "vary your teaching methods" speech, I never really reflected upon them, both just made sense to me.
Now, I am thinking about the "learning styles." Apparently, people seem to have an idea of what their preferred "learning style" is. Could it be that they are confusing "learning" with "thinking?" Or that they think learning and thinking is the same? I really don't know enough about the "thinking" literature but as far as I know there are different "thinking styles." Apparently, there are "visual thinkers," "auditory thinkers,"kinaesthetic thinkers," "linear thinkers," "holistic thinkers," etc. What about those? Do they exist? And if they do, maybe people just identify their "learning style" with the way they usually think about stuff?
Another thought that occurred to me while watching the video: why is it that people can memorize words better when they read them than when they hear them? The explanation in the video was that we learn things by meaning, not by auditory representation. But isn't a written word just a visual representation? Are we maybe "socialized" or "educated" to process visual representations of words differently, more efficiently? What about blind people? They rely much more on their auditory senses. Are there differences in how blind people learn? Are there people who learn better by hearing something or "reading" something in Braille?
OK, my flow of ideas is seizing, I had a lot more thoughts when I read the paper but apparently I couldn't get them in here fast enough...
Please feel free to respond, I would be delighted to have a little argument (as in Argument is Play; I can elaborate on that metaphor if there is interest ;-) )
Benedikt, I can't think of a reason to distinguish "learning style" from "thinking style," and I don't know of distinct research on "thinking styles." (What is learning other than thinking? Thinking that gets somewhere?) But I'm not that well-versed in even the learning styles research, so I'm in no sense the last word.
ReplyDeleteSomething that occurs to me is that if you like a certain kind of activity more, you might be more willing to participate in it, more engaged with it, etc, and thus it might work better for you, not for any brain reason but because of the affective issues. Jordan says part of the reason I'm a good baker is that I like to bake, so I do it a lot, so I get a lot of practice, and thus I get good at it. Does the cited learning-styles research include situations in which people get to choose their activities, or is it all controlled experiments, in which people are told to do either A or B (kinesthetic or auditory or whatever) for equal times and then we measure the learning outcome?
I would like to share the nasal thing with the E2 teachers.
ReplyDeleteAnd the research on learning preferences.