Learning Styles Don't Matter Part 2

I thought it be a good idea to expand on the some more on my last post. I thought it nice to condense the basic ideas of the Heterodoxy web site for those people who are too lazy to check it out for themselves and for me to read it again. Also, it is so refreshing to read something which is just plain common sense. I created a short summary for the main topics I care about. As I stated in my last post, this guy's ideas are pretty much against what is being taught in most colleges of education and the public school lingo of today. A lot of times teachers act like a bunch of sheep following what ever the education "experts" tell us. I think that's why he is "against" everything. Comments are welcome.

A “positive learning environment” is irrelevant: At the heart of this assumption is the self-indulgent and individualistic notion of the primacy of personal feelings.

...indiscriminate use of praise in the classroom reduces student achievement because it leads them to believe that mediocre work is really excellent and lowers their aspirations.

"teacher as entertainer" — the kind of teacher who believes that students will learn as long as you make learning "fun" enough.

Learning is not mindless "fun".... It is hard work. It does not have to be miserable work, but any denial of the work aspect inevitably compromises standards.

We shouldn’t support students: The problem with "supporting" students is that in many — probably most — cases it does not work. It merely defers their ultimate failure: or of course it results in collusion between the staff and their incapable students to "dumb down" the course so that they do pass.

...the journalism diploma has no system for allowing deferrals of assignments: in journalism, the deadline is absolute — if you can't make it, you don't deserve to be a journalist.

Learning styles don’t matter: Learning styles theory is an academic luxury: the students not only have rights but also responsibilities.

You can't tune in to all of them, so they have to tune in to you ... pandering to learning styles may be doing the students a disservice: they will benefit more from adapting and becoming versatile, more able to respond both to formal teaching and learning from experience, than they will from having everything made as easy as possible for them in your particular subject.

Against learning objectives: Formulation of objectives, particularly in its extreme form as "outcomes" is naive, objectionable and patronizing. It is naive because it denies the complexity of the teaching and learning task.

It is objectionable because it seeks to deny the individuality of the students' understanding.

Indeed, at a technical level, it is difficult to see just how you could realistically specify objectives in the higher reaches of Bloom’s taxonomy in the cognitive domain. It may be clear what counts as "knowledge", but as you move towards "analysis", "synthesis" and especially "evaluation", an attempt to specify in advance what these will look like is inherently subjective.

Against criterion-referenced assessment: Pre-determined criteria are set, and everyone who meets them gets the appropriate grade, even if everyone passes.

The fundamental problem is that norm-referencing embraces the possibility of failure, and in a mistaken effort not to hurt anyone's feelings we have rejected that. But, in the absence of mechanisms to prolong periods of study until students can meet realistic criteria, we are stuck with a trade-off between failure and lowering standards.

For teacher-centered teaching: If we know something and the students don't, why can't we just tell them what it is? The usual argument is that it is important for the students to "engage" with the material, and the lecture, which is the principal method of "delivery"—as opposed to "consumption"—oriented teaching, simply induces passivity and even surface learning.

Focus on what you want the students to learn, and you stifle and restrict what they might learn. Focus on what you want to say, and you permit them to take away what they want, and to make it applicable to their own situation.

So-called "student-centred learning" is an oxymoron. It is about not trusting students to learn. It is a sophisticated manipulative game of getting them to jump through hoops of the faculty's devising.