Weren’t learning styles type ideas mostly debunked or rather turned out to be something for which very little evidence existed?
I don’t know. But the converse is that there’s one style that’s optimal for nearly everybody. Yet many different styles are used in practice around the world. Which style is supposed to be best?
ETA: retracted, my bad. I thought you were talking about “teaching styles” not “learning styles”.
Actually, teaching styles is more what I meant. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been different people respond to learning differently, though that still doesn’t sound right.
For this, I have only anecdotal evidence, albeit quite strong. I’ve seen it, both in people I’ve tried to teach things to, and in people I’ve learned alongside.
I find the reactions to this topic in this thread very interesting, given that the (currently) second-most-upvoted article on the site contains this passage:
There’s a lot of data on teaching methods that students enjoy and learn from. I had some of these methods...inflicted...on me during my school days, and I had no intention of abusing my own students in the same way. And when I tried the sorts of really creative stuff I would have loved as a student...it fell completely flat. What ended up working? Something pretty close to the teaching methods I’d hated as a kid. Oh. Well. Now I know why people use them so much. And here I’d gone through life thinking my teachers were just inexplicably bad at what they did, never figuring out that I was just the odd outlier who couldn’t be reached by this sort of stuff.
I don’t know. But the converse is that there’s one style that’s optimal for nearly everybody. Yet many different styles are used in practice around the world. Which style is supposed to be best?
ETA: retracted, my bad. I thought you were talking about “teaching styles” not “learning styles”.
Actually, teaching styles is more what I meant. Perhaps a better phrasing would have been different people respond to learning differently, though that still doesn’t sound right. For this, I have only anecdotal evidence, albeit quite strong. I’ve seen it, both in people I’ve tried to teach things to, and in people I’ve learned alongside.
I find the reactions to this topic in this thread very interesting, given that the (currently) second-most-upvoted article on the site contains this passage: