Its time for a Cage Match!
Good teaching is good teaching, but what does that mean?
Dear Dan,
You had me. I was on the road with you. Learning styles don’t really exist, there are only learning preferences. But, in an amazing feat of under cutting of all your scientific jazzmatazz you said this:

“Good teaching is good teaching and teachers don’t need to adjust their teaching to individual students learning styles.”

I heard it. It planted itself like a seed. It began to grow. By Friday it was repeating itself, good teaching is good teaching, good teaching is good teaching, good teaching is good teaching, good teaching is good teaching, good teaching is good teaching, good teaching is good teaching, good teaching is good teaching.

What was it that bothered me about that statement. I couldn’t remember. Then I saw this video of Malcolm Gladwell discussing the man who invented chunky spaghetti sauce, Howard Mouskewitz, one of his idols. It is a long video, so set aside almost twenty minutes in case you get engrossed.

What clicked for me was that when Mouskewitz conducted taste tests of 10 different tomato sauces approximately 1/3 of the participants preferred traditional, 1/3 zesty, and 1/3 chunky.

At the time that the testing was done, there were no chunky tomato sauces on the shelves. The people preferred something that was not even being offered at the time. The sauce companies all thought that good sauce was good sauce and that they didn’t need to adjust their sauce to meet the preferences of their customers. When they did adjust and offer more variety, it took off, lots of people discovered chunky sauce and loved it.

So Dr. Willingham, here is my final answer, good teaching IS adjusting to individual students learning styles. When kids don’t get something, you change your approach, you try a visual strategy, a kinesthetic strategy, a verbal strategy. It may not be that conscious, it may be a look in a kids eye, a shared experience, a connection between teacher and student that causes that teacher to try that strategy with that kid. It is a pragmatically scientific approach, not a positivist one and that is the reason it works. Because, in the classroom it is the learning that matters most, and figuring out why second.

Photo of Daniel Willingham by Dan Addison, University of Virginia Public Affairs.