Teaching and the belief in unreal things

From Notable Links Noted at Siris.  

Making a point that it can take a long time for the system to clear itself of cognitive pollution, ideas which were popular but wrong.

The original article about which he is commenting is Learning styles don’t exist by Carl Hendrick.  The subheading is A teaching approach that is based on students’ preferences sounds laudable. But this misunderstands how learning happens.  

It is an information rich article with a lot of history of how we got from there to here.  But the simple empirical fact is that for all its appeal and cost, Learning Styles do not deliver good results where old fashioned directed learning does.  

If Learning Style does not deliver desirable results, why is the education establishment still committed to it?  My explanation is that it is 1) emotionally appealing, 2) many in the education ecosystem have a financial stake in its survival, 3) it is a natural argument for extra funding, and 4) it allows teachers and school systems to avoid the crux of the issue.  Learning styles can be appealing to students even if they don't learn anything.  But what we should concerned about is whether they learning; not whether they enjoyed themselves.

Actually, there is probably a fifth explanation and it might be the most important.  Learning styles implies highly trained, or at least highly credentialed teachers who can command higher compensation.  Without Learning Styles and its associated complexity, Directed Learning is far more straightforward, far easier for many more people to do and therefore potentially much cheaper.  

Siris comments:

When I was an undergrad, I had a few friends were Education majors, and they spent an extraordinarily amount of time with learning styles theory. But over time, it just became very obvious that nothing was really replicating. It's been certain for quite some time now that it was not effective, and yet I still come across traces of it.

Here is the dirty little secret: Nobody knows how to teach. Teaching gets done; basically, teachers work with students and some learning happens, and different teachers over time find things that seem to work through trial and error and a bit of imagination. But it becomes very clear that what works for one teacher won't necessarily work for another; a lot of things that seem very effective if you only look at one teacher turn out to work only because of the teacher's background familiarity or comfort or personality or preferred way of doing things. Some methods seem to work (like the Socratic method), but do not do so in any way that shows up consistently in any measurements we can make; they might be defended on intangible grounds, but it's difficult to prove to skeptics that they work, much less work better than any other method. Others sound like they would work, but when implemented don't have any consistent results. Since before my time there has been one and only one pedagogical method that measurably, consistently, and for every student demographic (equitably, as we would say today) delivers: rote drills. 

Learning Style and EQ versus IQ are two tropes that are embedded in education circles despite there being no evidence to support them.  No wonder people get sick of the establishment.  It can appear to all be a scam.