Myths About Learning

Hello Everyone,

 

I hope you had a restful spring vacation and are prepared for the craziness of the final leg of the year. Students are active in classes, on the athletic fields, and on stage, and it’s a wonderful time to see how much they have grown over the course of the year.

 

One of my favorite things to do each spring is to have lunch with the eighth graders in small groups of about ten. We meet in the conference room, and our amazing dining hall staff prepares something a little more custom than the usual fare (last year it was calzones made to order). During these meetings, we talk about the students’ experiences during their time in middle school. Which projects and activities spoke to them, and which needed improvement; which trips were meaningful and rich, and which could use some tweaking. The final thing I do is to give each student a small piece of paper and ask them to write on it the teacher who has had the greatest positive impact on them during their time in middle school. I am always struck by how many teachers get named. There’s not just one charismatic teacher whom everyone clambers to be around; different teachers speak to different students in different ways; and this makes it possible for our students to feel connected to several different teachers and therefore supported.

 

Thinking about this exercise, I realize that one conclusion that might come out of it is that, much like the way different students connect with different faculty, different students learn differently. One student might speak excitedly about the Keystone trip in fifth grade while another might rave about the Rube Goldberg project in sixth. While one student may have loved the “This I Believe” assignment in eighth grade, another may have instead found the Hunger Banquet in seventh grade more meaningful. Can we conclude from these conversations that students have different learning styles that allow them to learn better when content is delivered in those styles?

 

When I was in graduate school, I would have answered this question with a resounding yes. Clearly, I believed, some people learned better by listening, whereas some learned visually and yet others kinesthetically. When we came up with lessons plans, we examined which learning styles would learn best from which types of lessons.

 

As it turns out, though, the research shows that this assumption doesn’t really pan out. While certain people may be drawn to getting information in different ways, there is little to no evidence to show that they actually learn the material better than if it were delivered in a different way or better than someone who has a different learning style. In fact, the efficacy of the style of delivery has much more to do with the content being delivered. For instance, it would be really difficult to learn geometry purely aurally with no visual models; and it would be equally difficult to learn a song just by looking at the notes and not actually playing them.

 

What research does show is that people learn better when exposed to material through a variety of methods and when they have the opportunity to engage with the material in meaningful ways. So while simply reading a textbook about the Revolutionary War may give someone a cursory understanding of the event, that person will develop a much clearer and deeper understanding by having class discussions about some of the major issues, or, even better, engaging in some kind of simulation where students are working together to create a government or develop a constitution (or both!). People learn better when exposed to material multiple times and in multiple ways. And, invariably, people learn better when they are engaged and interested, when they can make connections, and when they feel invested – in other words, when there are stakes and the stakes are real.

 

I’ll never forget one of my first years teaching, I was also coaching volleyball, and I was demonstrating to a student how to do an overhand serve. After going over the movement step by step, I attempted to hand her the volleyball, and she pushed it away, saying, “Oh, I don’t learn by doing; I learn best by watching.” Even at the time, a time when the idea of learning styles was in vogue, I realized the absurdity of this statement – she would in fact have to serve multiple times over the course of the season, and to think that she would get better simply from watching her coach demonstrate a serve rather than getting in there and feeling it, trying over and over again until she got it right, was, of course, ridiculous. At Dawson, we try to create opportunities for our students to try and fail multiple times, for it is only through those experiences that they can learn and improve, and through those experiences, they will develop the grit and persistence that will carry them through difficulties to discover their passions and make a difference in the world.

 

If you would like to take a quiz about myths around learning, click on the link below, and then let me know how you did!

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/03/22/520843457/you-probably-believe-some-learning-myths-take-our-quiz-to-find-out

 

Have a wonderful spring!

 

Take care,

Heather