I have a colleague in Cognitive Psychology who rolls his eyes every time I mention Learning Styles or Multiple Intelligences. His claim is that learning style inventories are self-fulfilling prophecies that don’t really describe how we think and like to learn – they are simply pre-determined boxes we fit ourselves into. As a predictor of learning success, they don’t amount to much he claims.

Certainly learning styles and multiple intelligences constitute something of a fad among educators from kindergarten through higher education. You hear about them everywhere. And my friend in Cognitive Psychology has a serious argument – they are not necessarily reliable indicators of how individuals can and will learn. Some educators argue that this yet another tactic for pandering to students and dumbing down the curriculum by making sure we now teach in the way that will be most appealing. If students can’t read, then we’ll just have to show them pictures.

But these objections miss the point about learning styles theories. The idea is that as students WE tend to prefer one or two ways of learning and that is how we teach. Learning styles aren’t reliable indicators of future success, they are targets we can use to help our student achieve a balance – so that they can approach problem-solving and learning from a variety of angles.

The idea is not to find the way that best appeals to this student or that, but to make sure we are sensitive to the variety of ways of learning and knowing and to incorporate all of them in a balanced way into our teaching so our students can work on areas where they may be weak, but not without opportunities to build on their inherent strengths.

How many times have we heard about the quiet, non-talkative students who come alive using e-mail or a threaded discussion? This is learning styles at work, but the point is not to simply provide the most comfortable avenue of communicating and learning to those students, it is also to encourage them to develop their oral skills along with their written ones.

And the challenge we have as teachers is to make sure OUR approaches are balanced first – and that means we have to work self-consciously to overcome our own discomforts with certain ways of teaching and learning too.