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[polly_mer]

In my experience, the students who most want us to adapt our teaching to their learning styles are those who don't like reading.  And while I could certainly stand on my head and sing the lecture to you while shaking jingle bells, I would still expect you to show up having done the reading, having understood it and being ready to discuss it.  In my opinion, if your "learning style" doesn't happen to include reading a textbook for every class every week, I'm not sure you belong in college.  

I agree with The Fiona -- I think it's frequently an excuse.  The students who most frequently show up with excuses related to their learning styles are those who don't like to read.  And I'm not convinced that another word for "I don't like to read" isn't "lazy".  

Well, now, I love to read.  I read quite a lot.  However, to expand on Helpful's analogy, there are just some things that I can read and not be able to understand.  Because I am a competent learner, for those cases, I take notes, check on other references to see if a particular author's writing style just doesn't click, take more notes trying to get a coherent whole, then write up a list of questions, and track down someone of whom I can ask those questions.  Under those conditions, I will be quite annoyed if the response is "Stop being lazy and reread the book".

I read the freakin' book and it didn't help in this particular case.  Sometimes reading the book doesn't work and I need more, just like sometimes shouting instructions is not as useful as modeling the behavior.

However, I understand your frustration, Lotsoquestions.  I spend quite a bit of time as the instructor saying, "Did you read the book?  What specific questions do you have about the material?  What have you done to try to learn the material?  I can suggest other references that may help.  But you have to read the freakin' book to get yourself oriented to the next step for this particular topic because my lecture assumes that you have read the book and understood at least 80% of it.  The hands-on activity will not make sense if all you do is try to follow the instructions without an understanding of the underlying processes."

I agree that if one cannot or will not even attempt to acquire information from written material, then rethinking the college path is a good idea.  I'm not dismissive of the idea of learning styles and I make an effort to use other ways to reach students who ask for help and clearly aren't getting the material from one way of teaching, as I'm sure that you do as well.

Like you, I do have to wonder about people who claim to only have one learning style that must be catered to under all circumstances.  To me, that indicates a faulty idea about how the world works and what coping skills are necessary to become a functioning member of society.  That faulty idea should be remedied as soon as possible and a college classroom is an appropriate place to do it since sometimes in life one has a master who can demonstrate or shout instructions, sometimes one has a report about the desired action, and sometimes one has a crummy manual that was translated through Google that is missing some steps so that experimentation is necessary.  Anyone who cannot adapt to the given situation and make a valiant go of it will have a very rough life.  Education is not separate from life; it is both a life and a way to learn to cope with other parts of life.  </end homily>

[elven]

What I want to know is why these people don't seem to realize that *reading* is *visual.*  

If you find out, then drop me a line.  I had classrooms full of elementary education majors this fall who wished to discuss the fact that they had different learning styles not accommodated by my teaching methods.  I explained that they read the book, participated in discussions, did hands-on activities, did full-body activities, listened to lectures, worked in small groups, worked in large groups, worked as individuals, and selected activities to do from a list that encompassed several of the types of learning styles including naturalistic, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, visual-spatial, logical-mathematical, and verbal-linguistic (list of learning styles taken from edutopia.org) so that all of their styles should be accommodated on an average basis.

No dice.  They wanted me to give outlines of the material that they could memorize and then write back on the test.  Their learning style wasn't visual or auditory, as they claimed so much as lazy, rote memorization that required minimal effort on their parts.

Chime, chime, chime. Sounds like the class I taught last spring. Students expected that class be fun as well, or there was hell to pay.

[fiona]

I like having the wise Forumites confirm what I suspected: that the emphasis on "learning styles" is mostly a way for students to get out of doing the reading.

The example of engineers is a good one. They may not seem imaginative to us humanities folks, but they always do the work. They have no problem with a work ethic.

Maybe students should be required to do the reading before they are permitted to emit the term "learning style."

The Fiona

[post_functional]

Like most things the problem isn't with the theory and the nuanced practice/understanding of it but how it gets "popularized" even within universities.  Our *dolts* at the "learning center"  display a superficial understanding that gets promoted as "most students are visual learners!" and demand Power Point for everything or you are "not serving the students." 

Of course, in the Humanities this translates into "outline the lecture!" My complaint to them has always been "if reading text slides is *visual* why isn't reading a textbook?"  They come back with "its different!" And around in circles we go.  Students have been taught to claim that they are "visual" or "auditory" learners and so they believe that reading and listening to lectures "just doesn't work for them!"  And, again, we go in the circle of argument that you are asking for text slides and saying that "listening" to lectures doesn't suit your auditory style....what it comes down to is that the local practice of this theory often makes the promoters sound like idiots.

I like what a TA of mine did in a mandatory class. After he was admonished that *most* students can't learn by reading or by lecture but that they did learn well from "energetic power point with music and video clips" (yes, so easy to do for 17th century history!) he first asked if the issue wasn't "laziness" and when he was shot down asked:  "well, what do we do if the student claims to be a "tactile learner?"  The Education *doctorate* leading the session told him that maybe getting them to do "dioramas of historical events" might improve learning.  My TA (reportedly) laughed and was thrown out of the class.

I wonder what Dr. Ed would have suggested for olfactory learners.

[temporaryname]

In all this discussion of learning styles, it's occurred to me that the folks trying to cram learning styles down our throats (and I use cram here on purpose, differentiating it from those who present it as another tool we can use) don't seem to recognize that if there are really different learning styles, there must also be different teaching styles.

I'm a very dynamic and successful lecturer, and my lecture classes work better than other sorts of classes I teach. (Peer reviews of my lecture classes are consistently very positive, and both student evals and student achievement in my lecture classes are higher than in seminar or discussion classes I lead.) However, according to many of the learning styles folks, lectures are evil and must be destroyed. But why not just agree instead that we should do what we do best the way we do it best? If we do that, then students might not get something tailored to their needs in each class (a goal that I suspect is actually impossible, given time constraints), but they will get it over the course of their entire education.

[octoprof]

I like what a TA of mine did in a mandatory class. After he was admonished that *most* students can't learn by reading or by lecture but that they did learn well from "energetic power point with music and video clips" (yes, so easy to do for 17th century history!) he first asked if the issue wasn't "laziness" and when he was shot down asked:  "well, what do we do if the student claims to be a "tactile learner?"  The Education *doctorate* leading the session told him that maybe getting them to do "dioramas of historical events" might improve learning.  My TA (reportedly) laughed and was thrown out of the class.

I still haven't found a good way to use an "energetic powerpoint with music and video clips" to teach accounting...

[fiona]

I still haven't found a good way to use an "energetic powerpoint with music and video clips" to teach accounting...

You're probably supposed to play songs about money and dance being in the red and being in the black, concluding by tossing paper money to your enraptured audience.

I think you would be great at it.

The Fiona, also wondering about people whose learning style is "gustatory"

[aandsdean]

I once had a colleague, who I liked very much, who was about my age and at the same stage of his career, who once presented a brief fictitious but wonderful imaginative dialog while we were having a beer in town:

Student:  I have a learning disability.

Colleague:  Yes, you do.  You're STUPID.

[barred_owl]

I still haven't found a good way to use an "energetic powerpoint with music and video clips" to teach accounting...

You're probably supposed to play songs about money and dance being in the red and being in the black, concluding by tossing paper money to your enraptured audience.

I think you would be great at it.

The Fiona, also wondering about people whose learning style is "gustatory"

Octo--Insert this video clip into a PowerPoint, and you're set!  Cheers! 

Oh, and while we're speaking of alternative learning modalities, I'm convinced that some students believe they have an extrasensory learning style.

[systeme_d_]

For Fiona's "gustatory" students, and given BTR's TA's 17th c. history needs, I suggest preparing leindohy, which the French called "stinking corn."

You'll need at least a semester's lead time, but the recipe is easy. Just ferment ears of corn in a stagnant pond for a few months.

http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=nexus, page 9.

[temporaryname]

For Fiona's "gustatory" students, and given BTR's TA's 17th c. history needs, I suggest preparing leindohy, which the French called "stinking corn."

You'll need at least a semester's lead time, but the recipe is easy. Just ferment ears of corn in a stagnant pond for a few months.

http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=nexus, page 9.

I prefer tepa, a.k.a. stinkheads, which pretty much describes exactly what they are.

[lerasmus]

I like what a TA of mine did in a mandatory class. After he was admonished that *most* students can't learn by reading or by lecture but that they did learn well from "energetic power point with music and video clips" (yes, so easy to do for 17th century history!) he first asked if the issue wasn't "laziness" and when he was shot down asked:  "well, what do we do if the student claims to be a "tactile learner?"  The Education *doctorate* leading the session told him that maybe getting them to do "dioramas of historical events" might improve learning.  My TA (reportedly) laughed and was thrown out of the class.

I still haven't found a good way to use an "energetic powerpoint with music and video clips" to teach accounting...

Pink Floyd's "Money," King Crimson's "Easy Money," and any of the narratives-about-bling-in-rap-format would be ideal starting points.

[european]

Next time you have to take a class or workshop about learning styles, tell them you don't understand what they mean because you're a tactile learner. Watch them set up a diorama about learning styles.

[fiona]

Next time you have to take a class or workshop about learning styles, tell them you don't understand what they mean because you're a tactile learner. Watch them set up a diorama about learning styles.

Say "olfactory" as well as "tactile." Give 'em a real challenge.

The Fiona

[polly_mer]

Next time you have to take a class or workshop about learning styles, tell them you don't understand what they mean because you're a tactile learner. Watch them set up a diorama about learning styles.

Say "olfactory" as well as "tactile." Give 'em a real challenge.

Who else has been hugely amused by a workshop conducted solely as boring lecture read directly from poorly written Powerpoint slides about the importance of incorporating various teaching methods to reach the audience?

Did you manage to stop giggling or were you thrown out of the room as I have been?