A Conversation on Learning Styles with Dr. Bill Cerbin
Mention teaching and learning in just about any conversation and you’re likely to hear someone say “I’m a visual learner” or “Not me, I’m an active learner.” You, yourself, might identify with a particular learning style and perhaps see elements of how you best learn come through in the teaching strategies you use. Some argue that there are identifiable ways that people learn while others dispute that learning styles exist at all.
Over at the Virtual Teaching and Learning Center of the University of Wisconsin Colleges blog, the CFT’s new Assistant Director Nancy Chick is interviews Bill Cerbin in one of the Center’s podcasts. In the interview, Cerbin mentions several misconceptions about “learning styles,” ultimately concluding that “learning styles” as we often think of them, do not exist.
Cerbin and Chick discuss the misconceptions and Cerbin offers a few practices that enhance student learning. Jen Heinert (the new Director of the Virtual Teaching and Learning Center at the University of Wisconsin Colleges) poses a few questions for consideration, so head on over and listen to the podcast and then leave your comments for her on this topic.
Bill Cerbin is the Director of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning and Professor of Psychology at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where he has taught for more than 20 years. Active in the scholarship of teaching and learning he has twice been a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. His work focuses on understanding the relationship between teaching and college student learning and thinking.
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