In Defense of Howard Gardner

Blog #4: What is your learning style? How do you think this will influence your teaching/facilitation? Is your teaching approach more akin to behaviorism, cognitivism, or constructivism?  Describe an "aha" moment you had this week, if any.  

While pursuing my teaching degree in the early 90s, I spent a lot of time thinking about Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences which posits that students learn and understand in different ways. Gardner lists (at least) seven types of intelligences: 1. Visual-Spatial; 2. Kinesthetic; 3. Musical; 4. Interpersonal; 5. Intrapersonal; 6. Linguistic; 7. Mathematical.  Then, as now, I found his theory interesting and useful.  Certainly, I could identify that my strengths were in the Linguistic and Interpersonal areas. And as I began teaching, I could see certain strengths in my students as well, and so I tried my best to individualize lessons to play to students' strengths when I could.
  
In my education courses, Gardner's intelligences and the term "learning styles" were synonymous.  I have never found any of this to be problematic until I was introduced to Daniel Willingham's emphatic claim that "learning styles do not exist!"  Interestingly, Gardner never intended for his multiple intelligences to be considered learning styles. Recently, he set the record straight in a recent Washington Post article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/16/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-are-not-learning-styles/

In the article, Gardner claims there are two problems with the idea of learning styles.  One, he says those who use the term often do not "define the criteria for the style, nor where the styles come from, how they are recognized/assessed/ exploited."  Second, he agrees with Willingham that there is "not persuasive evidence that learning style analysis produces more effective outcomes than a 'one size fits all approach.'"  He also notes, though, that "the fact that one intervention did not work does not mean that the concept of learning styles is fatally flawed; another intervention might have proved effective.  Absence of evidence does not prove non-existence of a phenomenon."  

Certainly, I believe that claiming you can't learn math because it's not "your learning style" is bogus.  However, I do believe that some people naturally learn more easily or faster/are more interested in understanding mathematics than others. Regardless of whether we call them intelligences or learning styles, and regardless of Willingham's claims, my experience in the classroom tells me that: 
1. Students do have different natural strengths. 
2.  Students do have preferences in how they learn; material presented a particular way might click more easily than another.
3.  All of our senses work together to pick up information; what matters isn't how we receive it, but how we make sense of that information.

In the end, I think Gardner's advice is exactly right: Don't worry about whether or not "learning styles" exist, but do individualize your teaching as much as possible (easier to do with small classes, of course), and teach important material in several ways to deepen understanding.