It's not the answer to everything but it helps to think about it..
The myth here is that you might think you're different than others in this regard. Pretty much every human can easily space out during a lecture. Pretty much every human can learn something better if they do it themselves or can understand a graph better than a list of numbers. Everyone is a visual learner, everyone learns by doing. A lesson should incorporate all of these aspects.
I pay attention in lectures and meeting never take notes and that forces me to take everything in and engage fully. Reading and learning is more difficult because it involved in two activities .
That's the exact myth that actual research has shown is mostly false.
> This doesn't mean someone is exclusively visual but there certainly are preferences.
There are certainly preferences (in some part, this is a product of people buying into the myth), but the research keeps showing that catering to those preferences doesn't actually improve learning, and actually makes it worse compared to balanced approaches which address multiple modes rather than focussing on a learners perceived "preferred" mode.
Based on teaching a lot of people to dance and watching a lot of other teaching, the most effective thing I have found is to put someone in a practice dance hold (both people's arms on the other's shoulders, mostly straight) and sway back and forth until they start to feel body connection. Then start to change the magnitude of the sway, make a few simple steps with no warning, just keeping them rooted in the kinesthetic sense of connection. And when that connection is strong enough, bring them into close hold and just start into a waltz. I will have to massively overcompensate on turns initially because they don't know how to do them, but after a few turns around the room, they're ready for that correction. Left turns don't happen that first time out. Then take them contradancing, where they will be guided through interactions among lots of dancers and given a feel for flow. Add something like Renaissance or Scottish low country and you get step work. Only at this point is it useful to start observing other dancers or being told things.
You could always tell the self-taught ones. Their mental image of what their dance looked like did not match what others saw. That's because what you think you see is not what the actual movement is.
I know it's hard to believe, but it's true. A lot of dance movement is awkward and contorted, but it looks natural and fluid.
In any case, this thread is not fun anymore. Either I am totally weird or there is some communication going wrong.
No. Most people learn dancing by watching and repeating, with some explanation along with it.
> At least in ballroom dancing. How do they explain the steps?
In large part by demonstration (there's description that goes along, but the demonstration is primary.) Source: I've nearly completed a long course of instruction for ballroom dance teachers, from a well-regarded teacher-of-teachers, and have taken lots of ballroom dance classes, some from internationally-recognized teachers.
> "left, left, right, 1,2,3,4 turn" or similar.
That's more how they cue students going through a pattern that's been demonstrated than how they explain a pattern. You can explain a pattern in words without demonstration (manuals do this, for instance), but that's usually done as reference material that accompanied traditional teaching-by-demonstration (or, for auto-didacts, videos in place of in-person demonstration), and it sucks on its own; you need a lot of contextual knowledge to get value out of it.
Why not just say you learn better by reading? What is gained by dubiously subjectively categorizing everything into just "auditory", "visual", or "kinesthetic"?
If you can't learn from a lecture, you need to solve that problem by figuring out how to actually change yourself to learn from a lecture, not by avoiding lectures. You need to understand what can actually be learned from a lecture and what needs additional outside experience.
>Students need to be able to learn from the world they live in, not from some meticulously sterilized learning laboratory.
So, not from lectures?
[0] or seek out more appropriate instruction.
If someone isn't learning during a lecture, it's because they're not spending enough time on the subject outside of the lectures. It's not because they have an alternative "learning style". That would be like saying sitting on the couch is an "alternative dancing style." It's not a matter of style, it's a matter of understanding where you have to put your effort to achieve those goals. Maybe they weren't taught to do it. Maybe they've just never tried. Maybe things are in the way.
In the end, lectures are cheap. And this matters. You need to learn how to extract good knowledge from cheap sources. If you can't do that, then good luck convincing anybody to invest more in you over those that can.
I will also point out that the article is an attack on "learning styles", not a defense of lectures. Responding to some of your points:
>You're supposed to walk into a lecture already knowing the punchlines.
This was not my experience through high-school. Most of my class's in high-school and before would assign readings after the corresponding lecture; often times I would not even know what to study before the lecture.
Even in college my experience is different. Ignoring the useless lectures, I found that most of my lectures were more useful before I studied the material. This is probably heavily biased by subject matter: most of my useful lectures are in math, where the lecture serves as a broad overview of the material, which serves as a foundation for when I open the textbook to dig into the details. [0].
In contrast, in my linguistic classes, it is essential that I read the material before class: the lecture would simply not make sense without the reading, and what was being presented in lecture is often not present in the textbook. Having said that, and thinking more about those classes, it seems like my linguistics professors are aware of these issues: while textbook readings come before lectures, research paper readings are almost always come between lectures (eg. we would talk about an experiment and the results, then read the paper at home, then talk about the results again).
Again, the question is not lectures vs learning styles. The question in the article is "learning styles?", to which the answer seems to be no. This does not necessarily mean that the answer is lectures. And it almost certainly does not mean lectures in their current form.
[0] As an aside, this is probably a deficit in my ability to learn math. The "correct" way to learn math is to first go over the material once, then go back and understand the material in a second go-through. I have trouble doing the first step without the lecture environment forcing me not to jump straight to the second.
I haven't done the research, but it may be just as important based on the anecdotal evidence that certain types of lesson are more suited to different styles of teaching as much or more than the students are. It may even be that Timmy learns history better by reading while Tommy gets a better sense by looking at maps while talking about it, but Tommy can picture geography pretty well in his head while Timmy needs lots of diagrams.
I think learning to calculate voltage kinesthetically means that Timmy should use his hands to build a little circuit, and be told or shown how the voltage levels work while he's building the thing.
Learning styles™ really are that dumb.
Commonly, with learning styles a student was considered an auditory, visual, or kinesthetic learner. Timmy is an auditory leaner? He should learn to calculate voltage through lectures and song.
Timmy is a visual learner? He should learn to calculate voltage through pictures and diagrams.
Timmy is a kinesthetic learner? He should learn to calculate voltage through dance.
It's a shallow understanding of how learning really happens. No one learned how to throw a football by singing about it and no one has a strong understanding of circuits and how to design them just by listening to lectures.