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We can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections.

“Experience has long been considered the best teacher of knowledge. Since we cannot experience everything, other people’s experiences, and hence other people, become the surrogate for knowledge

the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.

White et al, argues that the belief systems of teachers form a barrier to new techniques and pedagogy. Moreover, they highlight research that indicates that the teaching style of individual teachers tends to reflect the “manner that they were taught during their own educational experiences (White et al, 2008, p. 41). As a result, White et al indicate that many teachers implement ideas based on their own experiences within a traditional, teacher-centred pedagogy.

where the teacher is still able to be a knowledgeable guide but also a co-creator of knowledge.

References to learning styles still abound in many curriculum documents at system and school level, despite the lack of evidence for their efficacy.

By all means, let’s cater for individual differences in student learning. This is best achieved through knowing our students as learners and people, thorough on-going assessment, constructive feedback and targeted, evidence-based teaching strategies.

Those studies about the wonders of handwriting all suffer from the same set of flaws, namely, a) that they don’t actually work with students who have been taught to use their laptops or devices for taking notes. That is, they all hand students devices and tell them to take notes in the same way they would in written form. In some cases those devices don’t have keyboards; in some cases they don’t provide software tools to use (there are some great ones, but doing it in say, Word, isn’t going to maximize the options digital spaces allow), in some cases the devices are not ones the students use themselves and with which they are comfortable. And b) the studies are almost always focused on learning in large lecture classes or classes in which the assessment of success is performance on a standardized (typically multiple-choice) test, not in the ways that many, many classes operate, and not a measure that many of us use in our own classes. And c) they don’t actually attempt to integrate the devices into the classes in question,

I have plenty of conversations with students about how to take notes already. Most of the time their problem isn’t which device (pencil, laptop, phone, quill) they use to take those notes, but how to take them and how to use them to learn based on their own experiences, learning styles, and discipline