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[fiona]

What's impressive here is that so many students seem to be invested in being stupid all their lives.

That's disheartening.

The Fiona

[polly_mer]

What's impressive here is that so many students seem to be invested in being stupid all their lives.

What you haven't taken into account is that school is school and real life is real life and school is just something you have to get through until you are old enough to have a real life.  Sheesh, where have you been?

[cgfunmathguy]

As Polly, Kedves, and BTR point out, some students parrot phrases because they sound like great excuses for putting in minimum effort. I taught a section of the college success seminar at OldJob once, and some students were stunned by their results on the learning inventory. It turns out that most of them had no clue what each of the terms meant. They had preconceived notions about what "visual", "auditory", and "kinesthetic" meant, but they were rarely on target. Most of them STFU about what style learner they were when they realized that each style required that they do some REAL WORK to succeed as a ____ learner.

[fiona]

As Polly, Kedves, and BTR point out, some students parrot phrases because they sound like great excuses for putting in minimum effort. I taught a section of the college success seminar at OldJob once, and some students were stunned by their results on the learning inventory. It turns out that most of them had no clue what each of the terms meant. They had preconceived notions about what "visual", "auditory", and "kinesthetic" meant, but they were rarely on target. Most of them STFU about what style learner they were when they realized that each style required that they do some REAL WORK to succeed as a ____ learner.

We haven't mentioned party pooper learners. That's what you are. Heh.

The Fiona

[philrels108]

What about stomapneumatic learners, who learn via oral respiration -- hence the preponderance of mouth-breathers in so many lecture halls?

[fiona]

What about stomapneumatic learners, who learn via oral respiration -- hence the preponderance of mouth-breathers in so many lecture halls?

There's got to be a similar name for eye rollers, too. Forumites?

The Fiona

[barred_owl]

What about stomapneumatic learners, who learn via oral respiration -- hence the preponderance of mouth-breathers in so many lecture halls?

There's got to be a similar name for eye rollers, too. Forumites?

The Fiona

Opticentripetal?

[history_grrrl]

I love this thread. It's very illuminating.

I find it ironic that, while the "teaching and learning" people spout on about multiple learning styles, they seem to believe that there is really only one learning style to which we should adapt ourselves -- the learning style that requires lots of music, film clips, and pictures. Perhaps we could call it the "TV watching" learning style.

Now, I actually use music and film clips and pictures and documentary films, partly because I find them to be great teaching tools. I also love using novels and memoirs, again partly because I adore these methods of understanding history myself. But this idea that reading and writing are passe is absurd. (And now we seem to have some of those digital humanities people jumping on the bandwagon, too. Thanks, guys -- and yes, you are mostly guys.)

I can also see from my own experience that certain learning styles don't work for me. When I took my first yoga class back in the Stone Age, I had an instructor whose "teaching" method was to say, "Watch me! And then just do what I'm doing." Then she would contort her limbs in weird ways and we were supposed to imitate her. I simply could not do it; there were too many things going on. In every other yoga class I've ever had, the instructor gives precise directions: "Stretch your left leg toward the back wall and turn your left foot outward 90 degrees." I have no trouble with that. I don't know if this is some kind of eye-hand coordination problem or what. But that woman's style really stressed me out.

I also cannot understand science or medicine. I realize these are challenging fields in which I have no training, so maybe this is normal. But when I look at a diagram of, say, the heart, my brain seems to shut down and I just can't make sense of what I'm looking at, except maybe right in the moment. Sometimes I do better with a plastic model. But I do wish I could find out ways of retaining this sort of information. (I was great at math, but I've always been terrible at science.)

One other thing, which maybe should be a separate thread: lately, our T&L people are also getting waist-deep into online classes, "service learning," and "blended-something-or-other," with some acronyms I couldn't understand when they gave a rap about their evil plans for us. What's clear is that this new lineup of "teaching methods" (such as, stick your students in some community organization and give them class credit for it) is designed to fit the New Pauperism (crappy budget climate). The T&L people, though, are pretending that these are really exciting new techniques that we should be adopting for pedagogical reasons. Anyone else noticing this unpleasant trend?

[t_r_b]

What's clear is that this new lineup of "teaching methods" (such as, stick your students in some community organization and give them class credit for it) is designed to fit the New Pauperism (crappy budget climate). The T&L people, though, are pretending that these are really exciting new techniques that we should be adopting for pedagogical reasons. Anyone else noticing this unpleasant trend?

Yes. The crappy budget rules all. Among other things, it means that:

1. We can't afford to lose any tuition (and we actually need to boost enrollment to get more), so we need to change anything we do that students object to.
2. More costly modes of instruction (small classes, intensive student-teacher interaction, in-person classes, specialized classes that only one or two people on campus can teach) are out; cheaper modes (large lectures, scantron, online/hybrid classes, distance learning, generic classes that are easy and cheap to staff) are in.

The trouble is, all that adds up to a significant downgrade in the quality of education, taking place at exactly the same time that they jack up tuition. So they have to come up with bulls*** creative explanations for why less direct student-teacher interaction (for example) is a good thing. And that's a big part of why we now learn that old-fashioned reading and writing (you know, hard stuff that requires instructors to supervise and explain) is a less effective teaching strategy than stimulating visual and auditory learners with multimedia stuff. And that's also why, in those large lecture-sized classes we teach, housed in lecture hall-style classrooms, we are told it's best for us not to lecture. Instead, we need to encourage more interaction - as the students sit in their seats that are bolted into the floor, all facing toward the lectern.

If we were really serious about promoting critical thinking, etc., we would be requiring more reading and writing, not less. But we can't do that with the current class sizes (and they are only getting bigger), so we need a nice BS explanation for why requiring LESS reading and writing is anything other than a gross weakening of our academic standards. The "learning styles" concept fits that need quite nicely.

[barred_owl]

What's clear is that this new lineup of "teaching methods" (such as, stick your students in some community organization and give them class credit for it) is designed to fit the New Pauperism (crappy budget climate). The T&L people, though, are pretending that these are really exciting new techniques that we should be adopting for pedagogical reasons. Anyone else noticing this unpleasant trend?

Yes. The crappy budget rules all. Among other things, it means that:

1. We can't afford to lose any tuition (and we actually need to boost enrollment to get more), so we need to change anything we do that students object to.
2. More costly modes of instruction (small classes, intensive student-teacher interaction, in-person classes, specialized classes that only one or two people on campus can teach) are out; cheaper modes (large lectures, scantron, online/hybrid classes, distance learning, generic classes that are easy and cheap to staff) are in.

The trouble is, all that adds up to a significant downgrade in the quality of education, taking place at exactly the same time that they jack up tuition. So they have to come up with bulls*** creative explanations for why less direct student-teacher interaction (for example) is a good thing. And that's a big part of why we now learn that old-fashioned reading and writing (you know, hard stuff that requires instructors to supervise and explain) is a less effective teaching strategy than stimulating visual and auditory learners with multimedia stuff. And that's also why, in those large lecture-sized classes we teach, housed in lecture hall-style classrooms, we are told it's best for us not to lecture. Instead, we need to encourage more interaction - as the students sit in their seats that are bolted into the floor, all facing toward the lectern.

If we were really serious about promoting critical thinking, etc., we would be requiring more reading and writing, not less. But we can't do that with the current class sizes (and they are only getting bigger), so we need a nice BS explanation for why requiring LESS reading and writing is anything other than a gross weakening of our academic standards. The "learning styles" concept fits that need quite nicely.

While I can understand, and certainly appreciate, your indignation/consternation, t_r_b and history_grrrl, I guess I must ask this question:  Which came first, the focus on learning styles or the current economic climate?  I was hearing talk about "learning styles" and things like VARK and service learning and experiential learning and  so forth, in the relatively halcyon days of the late '80s/early '90s, before there were furloughs and cutbacks and budget-tightening efforts underway.  

I don't disagree at all with the argument that higher ed is robbing Peter to pay Paul by increasing class sizes, moving to cheaper alternative delivery methods, or making it difficult to engage students effectively in a static classroom (FWIW, people complained about these same issues at my big flagship U back in the late '80s).  But, I do think that we're looking at an incredibly complex interaction that can't simply be boiled down to an "us" vs. "them" argument, where "they" are the proponents of the latest hypotheses about teaching and learning and the administrators who love them.  

I've been looking at CC jobs lately, and noticed that most of the schools I've investigated will at least advertise small class sizes and an abundance of cutting-edge technology right next to their ads for distance ed options or "quickie" degrees.  I haven't noticed any obvious PR about how faculty address learning styles, really.  Instead, what I see in the job descriptions is language like "student-centered" or "learning-centered"--whatever those terms mean--right in the same paragraph with phrases like "affordable" or "convenient."  Of course, that's what a prospective student sees, but isn't there still some latitude for instructors to be student- or learning-centered without having to conform to some latest hot trend, like "learning styles," for instance?  IMO, the trick is to figure out how to translate an instructor's own approach to student-centricity or learning-centricity into the language of assessment and accountability.  Those are the current hot-button topics, I think, not learning styles.

[polly_mer]

What's clear is that this new lineup of "teaching methods" (such as, stick your students in some community organization and give them class credit for it) is designed to fit the New Pauperism (crappy budget climate). The T&L people, though, are pretending that these are really exciting new techniques that we should be adopting for pedagogical reasons. Anyone else noticing this unpleasant trend?

Yes. The crappy budget rules all. Among other things, it means that:

1. We can't afford to lose any tuition (and we actually need to boost enrollment to get more), so we need to change anything we do that students object to.
2. More costly modes of instruction (small classes, intensive student-teacher interaction, in-person classes, specialized classes that only one or two people on campus can teach) are out; cheaper modes (large lectures, scantron, online/hybrid classes, distance learning, generic classes that are easy and cheap to staff) are in.

The trouble is, all that adds up to a significant downgrade in the quality of education, taking place at exactly the same time that they jack up tuition. So they have to come up with bulls*** creative explanations for why less direct student-teacher interaction (for example) is a good thing. And that's a big part of why we now learn that old-fashioned reading and writing (you know, hard stuff that requires instructors to supervise and explain) is a less effective teaching strategy than stimulating visual and auditory learners with multimedia stuff. And that's also why, in those large lecture-sized classes we teach, housed in lecture hall-style classrooms, we are told it's best for us not to lecture. Instead, we need to encourage more interaction - as the students sit in their seats that are bolted into the floor, all facing toward the lectern.

If we were really serious about promoting critical thinking, etc., we would be requiring more reading and writing, not less. But we can't do that with the current class sizes (and they are only getting bigger), so we need a nice BS explanation for why requiring LESS reading and writing is anything other than a gross weakening of our academic standards. The "learning styles" concept fits that need quite nicely.

While I can understand, and certainly appreciate, your indignation/consternation, t_r_b and history_grrrl, I guess I must ask this question:  Which came first, the focus on learning styles or the current economic climate?  I was hearing talk about "learning styles" and things like VARK and service learning and experiential learning and  so forth, in the relatively halcyon days of the late '80s/early '90s, before there were furloughs and cutbacks and budget-tightening efforts underway.  

I don't disagree at all with the argument that higher ed is robbing Peter to pay Paul by increasing class sizes, moving to cheaper alternative delivery methods, or making it difficult to engage students effectively in a static classroom (FWIW, people complained about these same issues at my big flagship U back in the late '80s).  But, I do think that we're looking at an incredibly complex interaction that can't simply be boiled down to an "us" vs. "them" argument, where "they" are the proponents of the latest hypotheses about teaching and learning and the administrators who love them.  

While I agree with the main thrust of your argument, Barred_Owl, about the embrace of learning styles and alternate types of learning not being new, I share TRB's and History_Grrrl's skepticism about how many adminstrators are really taken with the ideas themselves for the pedagogical merit and how many administrators are doing the budget analysis.

School (as distinct from education) has always been an exercise in how to optimize delivery of something vaguely resembling education at the lowest possible cost.  If we really cared primarily about quality education, then most education for most academic subjects would be done by small group tutoring and when I say small group, I mean three to five students per instructor.  But that's not going to happen and so we look at trade-offs.  Some of the trade-offs being made are certainly not optimal.  Coming from schools where the big intro classes delivered primarily by lecture are 70 students with a maximum of twenty students in a required associated lab section, I was horrified to learn that those same intro classes are taught in other places as 800 students in lecture with no labs at all.  I'm sure the best students who can make it through will always make it through, but I have to wonder about those other students.  As TRB wrote, there's simply no way that those students in the cattle-call-lecture-to-the-masses-and-evaluate-by-scantron classes at World-Class Flagship U or Snooty SLAC are getting nearly the feedback and critical thinking practice that the students in my capped-at-24-so-you-will-participate-in-discussion-and-evaluation-is-primarily-by-essay classes here at Isolated Open-Enrollment Comprehensive U.

[cgfunmathguy]

I can also see from my own experience that certain learning styles don't work for me. When I took my first yoga class back in the Stone Age, I had an instructor whose "teaching" method was to say, "Watch me! And then just do what I'm doing." Then she would contort her limbs in weird ways and we were supposed to imitate her. I simply could not do it; there were too many things going on. In every other yoga class I've ever had, the instructor gives precise directions: "Stretch your left leg toward the back wall and turn your left foot outward 90 degrees." I have no trouble with that. I don't know if this is some kind of eye-hand coordination problem or what. But that woman's style really stressed me out.

From this, I'd say you're an auditory learner, History_grrrl, and as you noticed, teaching style matters. While I understand the consternation of others about adjusting their teaching to the students' learning styles, I'll use Voxy's line (of which I was reminded by Polly on another thread): You have to teach the students you have, not the students you want/wish to have. I try to cover all four styles (VARK) at some point in the way I teach. However, I'm still not as good about getting the kinesthetic covered in some of my classes as I would like. This is something I'm trying to fix, but until I do, I'll feel like I'm not fully doing my job.

[t_r_b]

While I can understand, and certainly appreciate, your indignation/consternation, t_r_b and history_grrrl, I guess I must ask this question:  Which came first, the focus on learning styles or the current economic climate?  I was hearing talk about "learning styles" and things like VARK and service learning and experiential learning and  so forth, in the relatively halcyon days of the late '80s/early '90s, before there were furloughs and cutbacks and budget-tightening efforts underway.  

I don't disagree at all with the argument that higher ed is robbing Peter to pay Paul by increasing class sizes, moving to cheaper alternative delivery methods, or making it difficult to engage students effectively in a static classroom (FWIW, people complained about these same issues at my big flagship U back in the late '80s).  But, I do think that we're looking at an incredibly complex interaction that can't simply be boiled down to an "us" vs. "them" argument, where "they" are the proponents of the latest hypotheses about teaching and learning and the administrators who love them.  

I didn't mean to suggest that the pedagogical philosophies themselves resulted from the budget crisis. But I do think that the administrative enthusiasm for them - or, to be more precise, for particular elements of them - dovetails in curious ways with the shift toward assembly line instruction.

I've been looking at CC jobs lately, and noticed that most of the schools I've investigated will at least advertise small class sizes and an abundance of cutting-edge technology right next to their ads for distance ed options or "quickie" degrees.  I haven't noticed any obvious PR about how faculty address learning styles, really.  Instead, what I see in the job descriptions is language like "student-centered" or "learning-centered"--whatever those terms mean--right in the same paragraph with phrases like "affordable" or "convenient."  Of course, that's what a prospective student sees, but isn't there still some latitude for instructors to be student- or learning-centered without having to conform to some latest hot trend, like "learning styles," for instance?  IMO, the trick is to figure out how to translate an instructor's own approach to student-centricity or learning-centricity into the language of assessment and accountability.  Those are the current hot-button topics, I think, not learning styles.

I agree that that is "the trick," and I try to do just that. But this is where that odd dovetailing comes into play. When we get down to brass tacks, it often turns out that assessment and accountability amount to a dog-and-pony show to make certain "stakeholders" (accreditors, administrators, parents) happy without actually enhancing educational quality in a meaningful way. Because the thing is, it's hard to enhance educational quality all that much when you are ramping up section sizes, ramping down standards for achievement, and piling additional service responsibilities onto faculty. Adding some video clips to your PowerPoint can't really make up for significant cutbacks in the amount of writing faculty can assign. They just can't. So yes, I think that pedagogical philosophies that rationalize cutting back on writing and promoting movie watching are 1. bollocks and 2. a handy way for administrators to pretend that they are promoting better student learning, when in fact they are presiding (willingly or not, consciously or not) over a wholesale dismantling of the liberal arts curriculum.

[barred_owl]

While I can understand, and certainly appreciate, your indignation/consternation, t_r_b and history_grrrl, I guess I must ask this question:  Which came first, the focus on learning styles or the current economic climate?  I was hearing talk about "learning styles" and things like VARK and service learning and experiential learning and  so forth, in the relatively halcyon days of the late '80s/early '90s, before there were furloughs and cutbacks and budget-tightening efforts underway. 

I don't disagree at all with the argument that higher ed is robbing Peter to pay Paul by increasing class sizes, moving to cheaper alternative delivery methods, or making it difficult to engage students effectively in a static classroom (FWIW, people complained about these same issues at my big flagship U back in the late '80s).  But, I do think that we're looking at an incredibly complex interaction that can't simply be boiled down to an "us" vs. "them" argument, where "they" are the proponents of the latest hypotheses about teaching and learning and the administrators who love them. 

I didn't mean to suggest that the pedagogical philosophies themselves resulted from the budget crisis. But I do think that the administrative enthusiasm for them - or, to be more precise, for particular elements of them - dovetails in curious ways with the shift toward assembly line instruction.

I've been looking at CC jobs lately, and noticed that most of the schools I've investigated will at least advertise small class sizes and an abundance of cutting-edge technology right next to their ads for distance ed options or "quickie" degrees.  I haven't noticed any obvious PR about how faculty address learning styles, really.  Instead, what I see in the job descriptions is language like "student-centered" or "learning-centered"--whatever those terms mean--right in the same paragraph with phrases like "affordable" or "convenient."  Of course, that's what a prospective student sees, but isn't there still some latitude for instructors to be student- or learning-centered without having to conform to some latest hot trend, like "learning styles," for instance?  IMO, the trick is to figure out how to translate an instructor's own approach to student-centricity or learning-centricity into the language of assessment and accountability.  Those are the current hot-button topics, I think, not learning styles.

I agree that that is "the trick," and I try to do just that. But this is where that odd dovetailing comes into play. When we get down to brass tacks, it often turns out that assessment and accountability amount to a dog-and-pony show to make certain "stakeholders" (accreditors, administrators, parents) happy without actually enhancing educational quality in a meaningful way. Because the thing is, it's hard to enhance educational quality all that much when you are ramping up section sizes, ramping down standards for achievement, and piling additional service responsibilities onto faculty. Adding some video clips to your PowerPoint can't really make up for significant cutbacks in the amount of writing faculty can assign. They just can't. So yes, I think that pedagogical philosophies that rationalize cutting back on writing and promoting movie watching are 1. bollocks and 2. a handy way for administrators to pretend that they are promoting better student learning, when in fact they are presiding (willingly or not, consciously or not) over a wholesale dismantling of the liberal arts curriculum.

Thanks for expanding your argument, TRB.  I agree 100% with what you're saying, and you've really laid out the complexity of the various interactions quite well.  I guess I'm a little more reserved about blaming the administration entirely, though--somewhere along the way, someone put forth the idea that addressing something called learning styles was a good one, and a whole lot of people jumped aboard that bandwagon, and they weren't all administrators.  The thing is, and I think this goes right to your argument, that administration does have the power to slow that bandwagon down and let everyone (who wants to) jump off--but whether they have the guts to do so is another question. 

I had written another post, which I was editing when yours popped up, TRB, that described the demise of a past and now long-dead popular mode of teaching (audio-tutorial learning, anyone?), to illustrate that pedagogical trends/myths do come and go.  In the case I was reflecting on, the shift away from A-T learning was instigated by faculty, but endorsed by admin in much the same way as we're seeing endorsement or rationalization of the whole learning styles thing now.  Perhaps there is some hope, if history is any indicator, that the whole learning styles thing will experience a similar fate?  Or are we (a global "we") too entrenched in the notion of satisfying stakeholders to hold out such hope?  Maybe I'm over-thinking it a bit, but I'm imagining a giant game of intellectual "chicken"--who's going to go first to turn things around?  Accrediting bodies? Faculty? Admin? Parents? Students? K-12 educators?  I won't even utter the "g" word (government) here, because there's a whole other thread about how well their intervention with K-12 education has turned out...

[temporaryname]

What's impressive here is that so many students seem to be invested in being stupid all their lives.

That's disheartening.

But not for those of us who both are raising children and have read Machiavelli--for us, it's an opportunity to have our own offspring end up higher on the food chain.