 Hi, my name is Tracy Tecajome Spinoza and this is a video on the learning styles myth. It's meant to talk about neural myths as an opportunity for teachers' professional development. I'm a professor at the Harvard University Extension School. I teach a course called the Neural Science of Learning. It's an introduction to mind-brain health and education. And I am associate editor at the Nature Partner Journal of Science of Learning. And I've also taught all levels of education from preschool through university and also in adult education. And today I want to do two basic things. I want to really encourage you to think about a way of using neural myths as a form of professional development, how this really should be a part of all teachers' basic knowledge. Then I want to use the learning styles myth as an example and leave you with a big reflection. Learning styles is not the same as the theory of multiple intelligences and I just want to make that big distinction using the evidence. The learning styles myth is based on an idea that people are either visual learners, auditory learners or kinesthetic learners. This learning style related to your sensory perception that you prefer either visual, auditory or kinesthetic learning. Now this is not to say that you cannot develop a cognitive preference for one of these styles because if after all you know when you're in third grade and I tell you you're a visual learner, you do nothing more than look for visual cues around the world, and so you can become a more visual learner. You can favor that kind of sensory input but it doesn't mean that's what your brain would like. Some other people have extended this idea to even go from visual, auditory, kinesthetic which sort of made a little bit of sense because it has to do with senses. But then they've lopped on here this idea of reading and writing. Not sure exactly where that came from. And other people have gone even further unfortunately to try to pretend like these things are associated with specific brain areas. I just want to say the things on the periphery here looking to include a lot more variety and novelty or have more active or physical activities in class or thinking very hard about how you create or design the learning environment. All of those things are terrific and I really hope they do happen. The main problem here is that they're pretending that all of this is underscored by research that says that learning styles is a real thing. And this becomes even more discouraging in education when we think about all the money that goes into promoting this idea of learning styles. And even surveys or tests that think that in 20 questions they can tell you what kind of a learner you are and based on that teacher should craft teaching interventions based on that particular auditory visual or kinesthetic preference. That's a little bit off. And the main problem with this it gets to the heart of all learning myths. All myths do harm. I think that we share the first rule with physicians that above and beyond anything we just do no harm. That means if the information does not have substantial evidence behind it we should not go in that direction. The worst thing is that this also takes away resources from funding things that we know are actually better interventions. And it also distracts from really learning how the brain actually does learn. In a very short response and I know we could go on for several years discussing how the brain really learns but in a very short answer basically you have to perceive your world. Aristotle knew this thousands of years ago. You perceive your world through all of your senses and basically your brain picks and chooses among the things that input that it receives and it tries to see if you have any kind of existing memory for the new sensory input or stimuli. And if you do you can connect on to that memory and you can reinforce that memory or you can actually invest energy and truly learn something new. This synaptic communication either because it's reinforced neural pathways or it's new neural pathways occurs between all the neurons in your brain and it's enhanced by familiarity, practice and repetition. And if there's enough repetition you can get a strengthening of the myelin sheath which speeds up the electrical and chemical signals in your brain so that you can actually retrieve information faster and be able to use it in new contexts. And so all this is just to say that your brain is constantly trying to make sense of its world using all of its senses. Not just one or another and not just favoring one or another. And so the main reason this is so sad is because all of these sensory inputs are indistinct neural pathways in the brain and basically by reinforcing multiple pathways you would give yourself the opportunity of being able to retrieve information in a greater variety of ways rather than just through a single sensory pathway. So again not only is this myth wrong but it is damaging because it keeps people from perhaps living up to their potential for learning by shutting down the other pathways in the brain for creating important memories for new concepts in learning. Just step back for a second and think, you know, very, very simply. How is this true? How could we ever get into believing that about kids? I mean, look at this little boy here. Getting hugged by his little sister. What kind of learning style do you think he has? Impossible to say, right? This guy is taken in the whole world through all of his senses and so we just want to remind teachers that your brain adapts to what it does most. And one of the saddest things about learning styles is that kids get locked into thinking that they are only meant to be able to learn through one of these sensory modalities and in doing that we deprive them of understanding their world in a greater variety of ways. So many of you might be saying, but I am a visual learner. I am an auditory learner. I am kinesthetic. It may very well be that you have become that because you've rehearsed that particular neural pathway more than others. But that's not really what your brain would like, right? And it's really clear that in early childhood education we're actually pretty good about calling attention to using all the senses. But thank goodness for people like Costa and Calak who remind us in things like Happen to Mind that part of understanding your world, part of being a critical thinker, part of learning to maximize your own potential as a learner is gathering information through all of your senses. And so we hope that you as teachers will begin to reject that myth. And if you don't believe me, let's look at the literature. Over the past dozen years there's been hundreds of articles that really refute the idea. Burr and Pasture spent a lot of time trying to determine what evidence is there for learning styles because it's so popular, right? Then we started getting more pushback. Just stop propagating this learning styles myth. There is no good scientific evidence behind it. Despite that though, it is thriving even in higher education where some freshmen are actually told that they should take this learning styles inventory before selecting their majors. That's really scary, right? What we really find out though is that a lot about learning styles has a lot to do with taking the little things that we do know about ourselves that we reflect on and sort of exploiting those to say that, okay, that categorizes you into a type of learner, which is really unfortunate because it really does limit you, right? Others aside from the original proponents of the idea began to try to test this theory and followed kids who had been blocked into being visual, kinesthetic, or auditory learners across learning trajectories to see exactly how they fared. And being categorized in that way did nothing to benefit their eventual learning outcomes. And the myth still persists even through the 2020s we still have people applying the learning styles myth despite the number of people that call for it to be tossed out and that money could be better used in other places. Perhaps one of the best summary articles comes from a passion learning colleagues that tried to summarize for the American science and public interest publication what evidence actually does exist for and against learning styles and what do we really know about this information? Bottom line is that they could not understand this huge contrast between the enormous popularity of this particular intervention and the lack of credible evidence which they found to be striking and very disturbing. And so on the whole of it, there's a lot of better ways to invest resources. And perhaps the first thing we have to do as teachers is appreciate the complexity of human variability. There's a lot of different kinds of kids in our classrooms and we have to embrace that. We have to embrace their differences and embrace the idea that they may be learning in very different ways. So I wanna thank you for listening and as a final reflection to sort of make this stick, think to yourself if there were three things we mentioned today that you didn't know before. And if there's two things that you really wanna continue researching you're curious about now and maybe one thing you'll do differently in your practice. Thanks for doing that and if you have any questions don't hesitate to get in contact. Take care.