Prompted by a tweet during his session at the Charity Learning Conference 2012, Peter Honey defended his learning styles model of learning which he created 30 years ago.
In a session on beliefs, Honey was asked whether his beliefs held true when it came to his learning style model which he created three decades ago. The question was posed by conference chairman Laura Overton in response to a tweet by weelearning.
This was his response.
2 Comments
I love it when a plan comes together! This is better than I could ever have imagined.
The interesting thing about his response is that although he may have set out to help people expand the ways in which they learn, his work has had the opposite effect. By codifying learning (incorrectly) it has actually made many people cling to their “preferred learning style” even more tightly. And given them an excuse for doing so. Although trainers may be largely responsible for warping his original intention, one suspects he could do more to change this if he really cared – with great power….etc. etc.
Anyway it’s all too easy to start ranting about learning styles – even the CIPD seems to acknowledge their flaws now, so I’ll shut up.
Massive respect to Laura Overton for asking the question and to Martin for recording and sharing it!
Thanks, Sam. I liked the fact we could actually bring a Twitter conversation into face to face session and document the result to be shared back out again. Agree that Laura should get the credit she deserves for asking. And thanks for posing the question.
More importantly, I think he should be more expansive on the fact Learning Styles was meant to be one way way of considering how we learn. It might actually help some who ‘rely’ on it as a model to get over their dependency and engage with other thinking on how we learn.