What are we paying for in teacher training?
From October 20 to November 4, 2024, I ran a Google Forms survey about teacher training. I promoted this survey via my own social media accounts on Substack, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. The survey collected no names, email addresses, dates of birth or any other key identifying data. Instead, it asked participants about their experiences training. Overall, there were 1045 responses of which 378 were from those who stated they trained in Australia and 143 were from those who stated they trained in Australia from 2014 onwards. I wanted to see how the Australian experience compared with the experience worldwide on a number of issues. I was also interested to find out whether the situation had changed in recent years.
I anticipate this being the first of a few posts on the topic and I only intend to present initial highlights here. I probably have enough responses from England to analyse those separately. There are also some questions specific to primary education that I will not report on in this post.
This is not meant to be a piece of peer-reviewed research, just a survey of my various groups of followers and their networks. I have not tried to compute margins of error or any other such statistics because the data is probably not rigorous enough to justify such an analysis.
Learning styles
I asked respondents whether they recalled learning styles being discussed during the university component of their course. 69% of all those surveyed recalled learning styles being discussed and 72% of those who stated they were trained in Australia recalled learning styles being discussed. Of those who stated they were trained in Australia in the last ten years, 83%recalled learning styles being discussed.
Is this a concern or a good thing? Learning styles are a classic neuromyth. Although people will express a preference to learn via one particular mode or another, a review of the educational psychology literature does not support the idea of tailoring teaching to specific learning styles. So, it could be a good thing if all these teacher training courses were discussing learning styles as an example of a myth about teaching.
