Department has a very particular style of teaching ...

[djandpuncan]

And it really doesn’t align with mine. I’m finding it really difficult to work with the sows in place and so have largely been doing my own thing (sticking to the topic but not delivering the lessons on the system) and have been told off for it in a department book scrutiny.

Has anyone ever been in this position?

No, I made it up, infinite. Hopefully no one needs ‘loads of evidence’ to know that learning to ride a bike requires kinaesthetic learning but that doesn’t mean that learning how to solve quadratic equations does.

OP - I think I would say that as long as the kids’ results in the tests are in line with those of the other class(es) then does it matter how you go about teaching it?

If your style is prescribed to you and you don’t like it then I would leave and find another job.

It doesn’t matter if it was your department head or the headteacher who said this to you; if you are being judged by the way in which you teach and you are successful then that’s all you need to know. Time to go.

I'm in shock that someone has suggested there's loads of evidence to support kinaesthetic learning. Where exactly?

grammar
I believe it's down to what is being taught e.g. learning to analyse language or MFL verb tables isn't going to be a very up and moving form of learning, but learning how to shoot a hoop in basketball would be, and learning about scientific phenomena may benefit from some hands on.
I don't believe there's any evidence for big claims that kinaesthetic learning is best overall.

Learning styles are nonsense, as is shoe horning in "act out what it's like to be a cell", but other activities that may have come under the kinaesthetic banner in the past are still valuable activites in their own right if planned appropriately.

No advice at all, but reading this has just brought back the absolute hell of having to put VAK in EVERY SINGLE lesson plan when this was 'in fashion'. Oh the hoops we jumped through! Trying to deliver VAK styles of learning for an RE lesson on The Ten Commandments was interesting 😂, or for a boring old punctuation session (thank GOD for Kung Fu!)!

It was madness 🤦‍♀️

My advice is to plan to stick out the year and move schools. Teaching is impossible as it is without this kind of fuckwittery in your department 👍

Do what you can to get by without drawing too much attention to yourself and smile and nod at the “tellings off”

The ridiculous controversial bit of the whole VAK thing is not that learning can happen when material is presented differently, but that students learn best from one type of presentation, which is different for different students, and therefore material to be learned should be presented to them in that way. Sometimes people get almost as carried away debunking something as others did implementing it.

Almost.

I used to have to have a poster on the wall of my lab for each learning style. One said, "As a visual learner, I prefer to read from left to right".

Sometimes people get almost as carried away debunking something as others did implementing it.
That's quite true. Baby and bathwater springs to mind.

I had a colleague who firmly declared they "don't do fun activities because my job isn't to be an entertainer", which sounds noble and I'd agree with the philosophy, but what it actually translated to in reality was "even though there's a wealth of material on the shared drive and schemes of learning with a range of material in different teaching styles, I shall ignore it all, do my own thing. My results aren't as good as the rest of the department and when I have any issues then I shall blame the students for not getting my way of doing things. I shall teach my way regardless of what the SEND portraits say. I teach in my set way regardless of the class. If anyone challenges me on it I will claim I'm not in the business of entertaining"
They were so closed minded to how things could be done differently and were quite disparaging of others I found

I know noblegiraffe is attempting to point out the ridiculousness of the bike study described, and I think there have more more than a few attempts to debunk so-called "learning styles" but surely it's common sense that actually doing the thing you're attempting to learn will be more effective than just reading about it or watching someone else do it?

X-posted with so much!

Yanbu. We didn't have kinesthetics but similar. It came from SLT and it just didn't fit with the subject I taught. Kids hated it staff hated it.