Learning Processes over Learning Styles

I have written so many times about the problems with Learning Style theories, and yet it continues to baffle me to this day how these theories remain so popular amongst teachers when there is absolutely no evidence to back them up.

In today’s post, instead of rehashing the details of why teachers should forget about Learning Styles, which I have done repeatedly over the years, I’m going to focus on one way that you can shift your perspective and approach. Feel free to take a look at some of my older posts for more on the general topic.

For those of you that still believe Learning Styles have a place in the classroom, allow me to introduce you to a new idea that might allow you to hold on to some elements of the theory while also implementing an approach that will actually helping your students.

Learner Preferences

First things first, I want to acknowledge that Learner Preferences are a real thing. It would be foolish to deny that different learners have different preferences. However, I often see educators using this to smuggle in Learning Styles through the back door.

As real as Learner Preferences are, they should not necessarily be granted in all cases. Just because a learner might prefer a particular approach, that is no guarantee that the approach is effective. And I say this as someone who strongly endorses the idea of Learner Autonomy and Learner Choice. But unless you have done a lot of work on Meta Learning / Meta Cognition with your students, chances are that they will not know much about what is good for learning.

Learning Processes

Instead of Learning Styles, you should make Learning Processes central to your classroom.

How do Learning Process relate to Learning Styles? Learning Styles Theory is really the suggestion that different students engage in different behaviours when they learn, and that different behaviours are better for different students. We can think about these behaviours as processes, that is, the sequence of actions that a student takes to move from ignorance to competence.

The idea of Learning Processes is that of identifying which behaviours, actions and interactions lead to effective learning. But rather than looking at which processes best suit each individual student (Learning Styles) we look at which processes best suit each different type of learning (Learning Processes).

Learning as a Process

Learning is a process. That is the starting point for this idea. We actually know very little about how we learn, that is what happens inside of us when we learn something, for example at a neurological level. But we do know two things: 1) that learning /does/ change the brain, and 2) what leads effectively to learning and what hinders it. One could reasonably say, I believe, that this is all we need to know. Understanding the neurology any more than that would be fascinating, but largely academic.

As educators, what we really need to know is what leads effectively to making those changes in the brain that we call learning.

To look at this from outside the brain, then, we can see that there is an analogy of the same process. The learner begins in a state of ignorance—not knowing something—and ends in a state of competence—knowing something or being able to do something. Of course, there must be steps and stages in between these two points, and this is what we call the Learning Process.

While I am on this topic, I should like to point out that when any institution claims that they can help you bypass the process—think, /How to read in 3 months; Speak English in 4 weeks; etc./—then you should be wary. Learning requires a process; without the process, there is no learning.

Learning Styles in This Context

While we don’t know too much about the precise inner workings of the brain at a neurological level, there are a few things that we can observe with regard to Learning Processes that indicate why we should not adhere to Learning Styles theories. That is aside from the fact that the research already tells us Learning Styles theories (I use the phrase Learning Styles Theories to refer to the whole catalogue, VAK, MI, Left Brain Right Brain, etc.) are not effective in the classroom, which you can read more about very easily with some basic googling.

The first thing we know is that while people want to identify as being more visual, more auditory or more kinaesthetic, the reality is that we have all evolved to have very similar brains in this regard. No matter who you are, what culture you’re a part of or how you prefer to identify yourself, the undeniable fact is that you are more visual than anything else. This is simply true for us all. 

Humans are a visual species. Approximately 30% of your brainpower is devoted to receiving and interpreting visual data from the world. Touch and hearing combined take up something close to 10%. So you might like to call yourself a Kinaesthetic person, but the fact is, unless you’re in some way visually impaired, you’re visual. I’m visual. We’re all primarily visual.

The second thing we know is that regardless of how individuals self-identify, their behaviour is much more standard. Students who self report as having one type of Intelligence or another tend to still approach learning the same way when left to their own devices. The vast majority of students do not behave or approach learning differently based on what Learning Styles or Intelligences they believe they have. Instead, if students are identified as being one type of learning or another, it is the /teachers/ who are more likely to change /their/ approach and the way they teach.

So, our brains are basically all the same, and even our behaviour basically tends to be the same even though we might believe we are different. The only thing that changes is how teachers choose to teach, and once again, research has shown very conclusively that when teachers teach based on Learning Styes identified amongst the students, it has no positive effect, and in the worst cases it actually has a negative effect on learning.

Identifying Processes that Work

So it should be clear by now that the goal of any teacher should be identifying which Learning Processes are most effective and using those while also cutting out Learning Processes that are not effective. What does effective mean? It takes the learner from Point A (ignorance) to Point B (competence). 

As we have seen, adhering to Learning Styles theories does not do this. So, is there anything useful we can take from Learning Styles theory at all? Yes, there is.

Learning Processes are built upon the idea that instead of assigning styles to individuals, we should assess what we are teaching and decide what processes are most appropriate to each lesson. To be very simplistic about it, if I want to teach a swimming class, then I will primarily use a kinaesthetic approach, and if I want to teach a music lesson, I will focus mostly on auditory techniques.

But Learning Processes are more complex than that. As the name suggests, they are not singular styles or approaches, they are processes. That means that to get the learner from Point A to Point B, the process could be long and varied, comprising multiple stages that using different modes of interaction.

Putting Learning Processes into Practice

Returning to the bike as our example, it is not enough to say that learning to ride a bicycle is a purely kinaesthetic activity. The learning process will likely begin with some visual input. After all, if you have never seen another person ride a bike, how will you know what to do when I put your first bike in front of you?

So the learning process might be something like a visual demonstration, followed by a kinaesthetic application, which will be accompanied by auditory feedback as the teacher coaches the learner (“hold the handlebars wider apart”, “use the brakes as you go down the hill”). This will likely be followed some quiet, intrapersonal reflection and then a lot of ongoing kinaesthetic practice.

When planning to teach a student to ride a bike, it would be of no use whatsoever to identify that student as an auditory learner and decide, therefore, to teach her using an auditory approach. So it is with teaching other things.

When you plan your lessons, do not concern yourself with identifying differences between the apparent learning styles of your students. Instead, focus on what you want your student to achieve by the end of the lesson and what Learning Processes will help them get there.

If you want to teach your students to write an academic essay, the process might look something like this:

Verbal-Linguistic: students see a model essay

Intrapersonal / Analytic: students analyse the essay for form / content

Visual: students see a graphic organiser clarifying the structure of an essay

Auditory / Interpersonal: Students listen as the teacher explains and asks questions about the model

Kinaesthetic: students do a matching activity, putting together cutouts from several essays

Interpersonal / Verbal / Analytic: students discuss with one another the features of the different essays

Intrapersonal/Reflective: students spend some quiet time thinking about what they want to write about

Verbal-Linguistic: students write their own essays using the form learned previously

Here you can see the benefit, I hope, of thinking about the learning process as multi-stage and multi-modal. It would benefit no student to turn this entire process into a sequence of kinaesthetic activities because he identifies as a kinaesthetic learner.

So next time you plan a lesson, don't waste any time or energy on Learning Styles; think instead about Learning Processes.