-by Sarah Mosle, October 2016

“Substitute teaching has to be education’s toughest job. I’m a veteran teacher, and I won’t do it; it’s just too hard. The role magnifies the profession’s biggest challenges—the low pay, the insufficient time to plan, the ordeals of classroom management—into an experience that borders on soul-crushing. At the same time, the job drains teaching of its chief joy: sustained, meaningful relationships with students. Yet in 2014, some 623,000 Americans answered school districts’ early-morning calls to take on this daunting task. Improbably, among their ranks was Nicholson Baker.

Baker has written more than a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. Whether in pursuit of new material or because the economic plight of even acclaimed literary authors is more dismal than we knew (or both), he applied to be a sub in a “not-terribly-poor-but-hardly-rich school district” within driving distance of his home in Maine, where he lives with his wife. The criminal-background check sailed through, though you might wonder why a writer of novels so raunchy that he’s earned a reputation as a highbrow pornographer didn’t get any further vetting. Imagine the texted OMGs and weeping-laughter emoji had Baker’s students dipped into his notorious 1992 novel, Vox, an account of a man and woman having phone sex on a pay-per-minute chat line. (At one point, the guy runs into trouble xeroxing his penis for a co-worker he is trying to seduce—ah, the pre-sexting inconveniences!)

Baker calls the worst of the hectoring teachers “paid bullies.” At 700-plus pages, Substitute: Going to School With a Thousand Kids is a surprisingly hefty contribution to the life-of-a-teacher genre, especially given that Baker clocked only 28 days in the classroom—a place he’d love to liberate kids from. (He enjoyed a 1970s school-without-walls progressive education himself. ) Scattered across three months and six schools, grades K–12, each of those days is chronicled with the moment-by-moment vividness that Baker has made one of his trademarks. In his novel The Mezzanine, for example, he plumbs an office worker’s thoughts during an escalator ride; fireplace rituals receive punctilious attention in A Box of Matches. Well before his teaching stint has ended, Baker the substitute has shifted into saboteur mode—the reporter as mischief-maker.

Don’t mistake me, though, for a starchy pedagogue. I’m the first to appreciate Baker’s skill at doing what is too rarely done—and what his book convinced me all of us teachers should do at least once a year: follow a student through a whole hectic day in our own schools to soak up the experience. Baker often filled in for “ed techs,” aides who shadow students with special needs, so he was ideally positioned to get the kid’s-eye view. And the kids, in his telling, are mostly all right—funny, genial, and curious, even if exhausted. Start time for the middle and high schools in his district is an ungodly 7:30 a.m., and bus rides are long. How Baker kept all the students straight (a thousand names to learn!) while taking notes and juggling his official duties is beyond me—not that anyone could call him out on mistakes, since he uses pseudonyms throughout.

Baker describes a din sufficient to derail any train of thought: ceaseless PA announcements and interminable bongs between classes. (One school where I’ve taught replaced the bongs with classical music, a minor change with a major effect.) Teachers hector students constantly: “SIT UP STRAIGHT, EYES ON MRS. HEARN.” “IF I HEAR VOICES, YOU—OWE—RECESS!” Baker calls the worst of the yellers “paid bullies,” and he’s not at tough-love charter schools that swear by rigid discipline. He also captures the small silences, “those coincidental clearings in the verbal jungle.”

Baker transcribes the onslaught of acronyms, too: smile (Students Managing Information and Learning Everyday), fastt math (Fluency and Automaticity Through Systematic Teaching With Technology), smart goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely). The litany conveys the obvious: The proliferation of packaged pedagogical tools and rubrics is testimony not merely to the churn of reform interventions, but also to an enduring absence of actual reading, or much focused academic work of any kind. I will note that Baker doubtless saw a disproportionate share of vacuous handouts, from sites such as superteacherworksheets.com. Busywork is just about all that teachers suspect subs can manage, a view Baker confirms as he struggles to keep a lid on the classroom chaos.

School-issued iPads provide portals to websites—BrainPOP, Quizlet, Edmodo—that supply further distractions. You needn’t be a technophobe to conclude that the machines, which he describes being “put away in their cases and swung around like medieval maces,” are more trouble than they’re worth. Baker isn’t even in school very often, and he finds the internet connection constantly down or too slow to be of use. Kids forget passwords to online accounts or are locked out for other reasons. An attempt to repair a software glitch erases one student’s work entirely. The result is yet more interruptions and hectoring. Sometimes the iPads get confiscated unpredictably, sabotaging the teachers who haven’t given up trying to design tablet-based lessons. And of course, when the iPads are actually functioning, students are primarily playing games, watching YouTube, or listening to music on them. That doesn’t bother Baker at all, given what he considers the deadening alternatives on offer—and his own allergy to goody-goody obedience.

As the book progresses, that allergy intensifies. Baker lets his rebellious inner Rousseau loose in an environment that, as he repeatedly remarks, is notably short on men. (We encounter no more than a couple per building.) When one student in a high-school remedial literacy class mentions an assignment on Rousseau, Baker duly notes the French philosopher’s sexism. Rousseau’s ideas about education “only applied to men,” he explains to the class. “Women were supposed to serve and prepare and make everything, and then the men would be able to go wild and have a free existence.” Yet Baker is curiously deaf to his own rogue-to-the-rescue style as he warms up to the task of second-guessing the mostly female school staff that toils away in what he considers a killjoy fashion. All the while, of course, he can look forward to resuming his wild and free existence as a writer.

Baker’s idea of good teaching seems to be showering students with empty compliments. When eighth-graders show him drafts of their papers on a short story, his constructive criticism doesn’t extend much beyond exhorting them to “tell the truth.” Blithely challenging the diagnoses of students with special needs, he makes his credo clear: Stultifying school is always the culprit. At various points, he wonders why this or that child is taking medicine for ADHD when, in his snap judgment, the kids don’t need it. (How could he possibly know, given that he’s seeing them on medication?) In the most egregious example, he takes it upon himself—after just one class with a 12-year-old who Baker has been advised has “some issues with emotional stability”—to urge the boy to cut back on whatever drug he’s taking. In this case, Baker does finally bring his concerns to the nurse—the only time he does so in the book—and she’s in no need of his wisdom. She’s already completely on top of the situation.

Baker starts actively undermining school routines, encouraging one girl in a middle-school math lab to flout the protocol of signing out of class. He tells another girl in the same lab, which is for struggling students, that she might be better served by homeschooling. For students who aren’t academically inclined, he has concluded that vocational education is the answer—and brooks no dispute. Two high schoolers, one of whom has already revealed that he spent time in “juvie,” are in a metal-tech class when Baker loses his cool. They are goofing around, playing on an iPad, and then they lie about having completed their work. Baffled to discover the teens are as disengaged in this class as they have been in any other, Baker gets furious. “This is a fucking screen,” he says, pointing at the iPad—not the real, hands-on stuff he endorses. He berates the boys for refusing the path that he is sure is best for them.

So much for Baker’s indictment of bullying teachers—though he seems to make excuses for the men in the profession. “I liked Mr. Walsh,” he confides late in the book, even though his arrival features more all-caps yelling: “SHOULDER UP, ELBOW OUT.” “WE ARE GOING TO MOVE ON.” Now Baker doesn’t mind the raised voice, which he perceives as macho, like something you’d hear on a shop floor. “The only way he could survive as a middle school tech teacher,” Baker reasons, “was to develop a voice like a union activist’s and shout all talkers down.” Suddenly I had to wonder: How bad were the female teachers he’d witnessed yelling earlier? Were they truly over the top, or in Baker’s head, did women’s raised voices turn them into harridans?

Baker wishes his students could be happy and more carefree.
Baker, a specialist in fantasies, can’t resist indulging some pedagogical ones, too—of school days cut back from six hours to two; of only four or five kids per class; of “new, well-paid teachers who would otherwise be making cappuccinos” driving in “retrofitted school buses that moved like ice-cream trucks or bookmobiles from street to street, painted navy blue.” Just kidding, he sighs, offering a bizarre verdict on K–12 education. “Ah, but we couldn’t do any of that, of course,” he writes. “School isn’t actually about efficient teaching, it’s about free all-day babysitting while parents work.”

Which is not to say that Baker envisages more-serious work getting done in the school of his dreams. He keeps saying “I love these kids” and wishing they could just be happy and more carefree. Even 15- and 16-year-olds, in his view, are too young and sensitive to learn about the horrors of the Holocaust, or read The Things They Carried, about the Vietnam War. But loving students—especially adolescents—is exhausting, time-devouring, demanding work, rather like parenthood. That’s also why teaching can be so rewarding, not that Baker sticks around long enough to find out.

Whether Baker is aware of it or not, his sub’s perspective on some very average schools delivers a message Americans still need to hear: K–12 education, as the province of children and mostly women, regularly inspires panic, but all too rarely receives the serious, sustained attention it actually merits. It’s not just students who sink under an onslaught of obligations in school, with no moment to think or have an unhurried conversation or discover a new approach to a lesson. So do the adults who “serve and prepare and make everything,” to invoke Baker’s paraphrase of Rousseau. His book is a reminder that kids and teachers are often in the same boat, and both deserve better.

By Dan Berrett SEPTEMBER 09, 2013, Chronicle of Education

“Students learned more when their first in­struc­tor in a dis­ci­pline was not on the ten­ure track, as com­pared with those whose in­tro­duc­tory pro­fes­sor was tenured, ac­cord­ing to a new pa­per from Northwestern University.

The paper, “Are Ten­ure-Track Professors Bet­ter Teachers?,” was re­leased on Mon­day by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and it sheds new light on the hot­ly debat­ed top­ic of whether the in­creased use of ad­junct instructors is help­ing or hin­der­ing stu­dents’ learn­ing.

The re­search­ers found “strong and con­sis­tent ev­i­dence that Northwestern fac­ul­ty out­side of the ten­ure sys­tem out­per­form ten­ure track/ten­ured pro­fes­sors in intro­duc­tory undergraduate class­rooms,” wrote Da­vid N. Figlio, director of Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research; Mor­ton O. Scha­piro, the uni­ver­si­ty’s pres­i­dent; and Kev­in B. So­ter, an as­so­ciate con­sult­ant at an organization called the Great­est Good, which uses economic methods and data analysis to help businesses.

They also found that stu­dents who were rel­a­tive­ly less qual­i­fied ac­a­demi­cal­ly fared par­tic­u­lar­ly well when they were taught by fac­ul­ty members out­side the tenure sys­tem, es­pe­cial­ly in courses where high grades were gen­er­al­ly tough­er to earn.

“We tried ev­ery pos­si­ble thing we could to see if this re­sult was frag­ile,” Mr. Figlio said in an in­ter­view. “In ev­ery sin­gle speci­fi­ca­tion we tried, this re­sult came up.”

Mr. Figlio and his fel­low re­search­ers based their findings on a study of the ac­a­dem­ic per­form­ance of the eight co­horts of freshmen, totaling 15,662 students, who en­tered Northwestern from the fall of 2001 to the fall of 2008.

They an­a­lyzed stu­dents who in their first term took, say, an in­tro­duc­tory eco­nom­ics course taught by an un­ten­ured in­struc­tor and an in­tro­duc­tory po­lit­i­cal-sci­ence course led by a pro­fes­sor who was ten­ured or on the ten­ure track. Then the re­search­ers stud­ied what courses the stu­dents took dur­ing their second term: Did they take eco­nom­ics or po­lit­i­cal sci­ence? And how well did they do?

The stu­dents were more like­ly to take a second course in a dis­ci­pline if the first had been taught by an un­ten­ured fac­ul­ty mem­ber, and they were more likely to earn a bet­ter grade in the next course com­pared with students whose first course in the dis­ci­pline had been taught by a ten­ured or ten­ure-track pro­fes­sor.

“A nontenure-track fac­ul­ty mem­ber in­creases the like­li­hood that a stu­dent will take an­oth­er class in the sub­ject by 7.3 per­cent­age points,” the authors wrote, “and in­creases the grade earned in that sub­se­quent class by slight­ly more than one-tenth of a grade point.”

Northwestern uses a four-point scale for grade-point av­er­ages, which Mr. Figlio said is a bet­ter proxy for learn­ing than stu­dent-sat­is­fac­tion sur­veys or standardized tests. “It’s not per­fect,” he said, “but frank­ly it’s the only thing I can think of.”

‘Rar­efied’ Students

The fact that the study was con­duct­ed only on stu­dents at Northwestern makes it both use­ful and lim­it­ed for its broad­er ap­pli­ca­bil­ity.

Northwestern’s stu­dents come from “a rar­efied por­tion of the prep­a­ra­tion dis­tri­bu­tion,” the authors wrote, and are “far from re­flec­tive of the gen­er­al stu­dent population.”

In fact, stu­dents who were de­scribed in the study as less-qual­i­fied ac­a­demi­cal­ly, ac­cord­ing to the five-cat­e­go­ry sys­tem used by Northwestern’s ad­mis­sions office, still posted an av­er­age SAT score of 1316.

Indeed, a similar study of students conducted at a less-selective institution yielded less-striking results than Northwestern’s. Matthew M. Chingos, of the Brookings Institution, analyzed 281 sections of algebra taught by 76 unique instructors at Glendale Community College, in California. Students whose sections had been taught by full-time instructors were about four percentage points more likely to earn a C or better on a common final examination than were those whose teachers had been part-timers, instructors whose working conditions more closely mirror those of untenured faculty members elsewhere.

But an un­ten­ured fac­ul­ty mem­ber at Northwestern may not look much like the stereotype of a part-time instructor cob­bling to­geth­er teach­ing gigs on mul­ti­ple cam­pus­es. Northwestern’s were gen­er­al­ly well com­pen­sat­ed and en­joyed longstand­ing re­la­tion­ships with the uni­ver­si­ty, said Mr. Figlio.

He add­ed that 99.4 per­cent of the un­ten­ured fac­ul­ty mem­bers in the study had taught at Northwestern for at least six quar­ters.

“This is not some­one we’re hir­ing once to fill a gap and then get­ting rid of,” he said.

Northwestern’s part-time fac­ul­ty members earn from $4,200 to $7,334 per course, ac­cord­ing to eight re­spon­dents to The Chronicle’s Ad­junct Project, a Web site that crowdsources sal­a­ry data for con­tin­gent fac­ul­ty members.

Administrators of colleges where ad­juncts do not enjoy sim­i­lar­ treat­ment “should not say this proves we should re­duce the ten­ure sys­tem,” said Mr. Figlio.

In­stead, he and his fel­low authors wrote, the re­sults of­fer ev­i­dence that des­ig­nat­ing full-time fac­ul­ty members to fo­cus chief­ly on teach­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly at research-in­ten­sive uni­ver­si­ties like Northwestern, may not be the cause for alarm that many see. It may even improve students’ learning.

“Per­haps,” they wrote, “the grow­ing prac­tice of hir­ing a com­bi­na­tion of re­search-in­ten­sive ten­ure-track fac­ul­ty mem­bers and teach­ing-in­ten­sive lec­tur­ers may be an ef­fi­cient and edu­ca­tion­al­ly pos­i­tive so­lu­tion to a re­search uni­ver­si­ty’s mul­titask­ing prob­lem.””

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/sen-ben-sasse-says-america-is-in-a-crisis-of-public-trust/

2 in 5 High Schools Don’t Offer Physics, Analysis Finds
Smaller schools least likely to offer subject
By Liana Heitin
August 23, 2016
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/08/24/2-in-5-high-schools-dont-offer.html?cmp=SOC-SHR-twitter&override=web

“Physics, as champions of the subject will remind you, is the cornerstone of many professions, including those in engineering, health care, aerospace, and architecture. And for students hoping to pursue those and other science, technology, engineering, and math fields during college, getting a jump on physics during high school is all but a requirement.

Yet, across the country, 2 in 5 high schools don’t offer physics, according to an Education Week Research Center analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights.

The numbers are worse in some states than others: In both Alaska and Oklahoma, about 70 percent of high schools don’t offer the course. Florida and Utah are close behind, with nearly 60 percent of high schools lacking physics. Iowa, New Hampshire, and Maine do much better, with only about 15 percent of schools not offering the subject.

A closer look shows that the problem is associated with school size: Nationally, the high schools that offer physics have an average of about 880 students. Those that don’t offer it enroll an average of just 270 students.

“When you have graduating classes of less than 80 to 100 kids, sometimes you have to make decisions in terms of what licensure you have teachers come in at,” said Doug Paulson, the STEM specialist for the education department in Minnesota, where about half of high schools have physics.

In any case, STEM advocates agree that every high school should ideally offer the course—and all students should have the chance to take it.

“Physics is often seen as an elite discipline that requires a lot of math and is only for college-bound students,” Monica Plisch, the associate director of education and diversity at the American Physical Society, said in an email. “This view is not only outdated, it risks underestimating students’ abilities and cutting off their future opportunities in STEM.”

Small Schools, Small Budgets

For small schools, perhaps the biggest hurdle to offering physics is being able to fit such classes, which just a few students might want to or be eligible to take, into the budget.

Steven Maier, a physics professor and the chairman of the department of natural science at Northwestern Oklahoma State University, said more than a dozen counties in his state—most of which are rural—don’t have any high schools offering physics. In small districts, “there’s often one science teacher teaching high school and maybe some middle school courses,” he said. “Districts can’t justify paying someone to come in and just teach physics.”

In Alaska, the large high schools tend to offer physics. But of the 250 schools that serve high school students across the state, about half enroll fewer than 25 high school students—so creating a stand-alone physics course is often just not feasible.

“We have village K-12 schools that have literally two or three high school students,” said Eric Fry, an information officer for the Alaska education department. “Teachers may teach all subjects and all grades. Those small schools do not have the capability to offer physics.”

According to Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the federal Education Department, schools were allowed to include virtual courses in reporting to the federal government whether they offer physics, but it’s unclear whether schools did so consistently.

Across the country, about 80 percent of alternative schools, which also tend to be small, don’t have physics, the OCR data show. Juvenile-justice facilities are even more unlikely to have physics: 9 in 10 don’t offer the course. (Those facilities were removed from Education Week’s national analysis.)

Some small schools do a rotation, offering physics one year and chemistry the next, which, as district and state administrators from several states pointed out, the OCR data may not have captured.

Dearth of Teachers

Among the most commonly cited barriers to offering physics by all states is difficulty finding qualified teachers.

“I get a call nearly every day from a school district—especially during July, as school districts are trying finalize their teachers—[that is] looking for a physics teacher,” said Tiffany Neill, the director of science education for the Oklahoma education department.

“Finding physics teachers is hard,” said James Ryan, the STEM executive director for the San Francisco school system, which does offer physics in a majority of high schools. In California, unlike in many other states, teachers need to be specifically prepared to teach physics. “We don’t have a [general] high school science credential,” he said. “So there are just fewer physics credentials out there available to teach.”

Michael Marder, a co-director of UTeach, a STEM teacher-preparation program that operates out of 44 universities, said upping the physics-teacher pool has proven tough. “Increasing the number of math and biology teachers has persistently been easier than raising the number of physics teachers,” he said, adding that only computer science has been more difficult.

Yet, at the same time, there’s evidence that student interest in the subject is growing—perhaps partly because of the recent nationwide push to get more, as well as more-diverse, students interested in STEM.

The number of students taking the Advanced Placement physics exam doubled between 2014 and 2015, according to the College Board, which administers the test.
Data from the American Institute of Physics show that enrollment in high school physics classes has gone up significantly since 1990. About 39 percent of students now take physics in high school. That’s still far behind biology, though, which nearly every student takes before graduating.
Low pay is among the culprits for why it’s so hard to find teachers.

“The median starting salary for a physics major who becomes a high school teacher is about $10,000 less than getting a STEM job in the private sector,” Plisch explained by email, “and that can be after an additional year in college to earn certification.”

Pay has been a particular problem in Oklahoma, which ranks 48th for average teacher salary in a state comparison this year by the National Education Association.
“Many teachers who are teaching physics in public high schools are being offered positions in career-tech schools or business and industry that can pay more,” said Neill of Oklahoma’s education department.

But pay alone doesn’t explain the physics-teacher shortage, since math, biology, and chemistry teachers could also up their salaries outside of education, and yet there are many more of them in schools. Another major factor is that universities simply aren’t churning out very many physics majors—and of those who do get a physics degree, just a fraction will end up going into teaching.

“At the college level, [physics] is one of the least-liked classes on campus and has been for a long time,” said Marder of UTeach. “It’s really hard, and we’ve gone in for grade inflation less than just about anybody else.”

The most prolific teacher-preparation programs in the country are only producing about a dozen physics teachers per year, according to a 2012 report by the Task Force on Teacher Education in Physics, a group formed by the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics.

Most universities are producing far fewer, if any.

Because the pool of physics education graduates is so small, many of the people who end up in physics classrooms have taken nontraditional routes to get there. They may go through emergency certification or professional-development programs or simply take the physics-certification test—often without having ever studied the subject in a university setting.

‘Cyclical Problem’

That’s despite the fact that the American Association of Physics Teachers says a new physics teacher needs an undergraduate major or minor in the subject to reach an “acceptable” minimum level of preparation.

“The teachers teaching physics aren’t well prepared,” said Eric Brewe, a physics education researcher at Florida International University in Miami. “Students are not getting the best educational experience you can get in physics.”

That leads to a few different problems: An unprepared teacher can eventually drive enrollment in the class down, Brewe said. “The students understand, and guidance counselors understand, and probably other teachers understand this isn’t a good course or a good situation.”

Then when funding gets tight, small classes can end up on the chopping block. “As schools introduce budget cuts, that becomes low-hanging fruit,” said Neill.
And either taking a bad physics course in high school or not taking one at all often discourages students from pursuing STEM in college.
“It’s a cyclical problem,” said Brewe.

ESSA Effect

The new federal education law has some STEM administrators on edge about whether finding and training physics teachers may soon get even harder.

The Every Student Succeeds Act eliminates the Math Science Partnerships program, which put about $150 million toward collaborations between higher education institutions and high-need school districts.”

Teachers must ditch ‘neuromyth’ of learning styles, say scientists
Eminent academics from worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology voice concerns over popularity of method

The academics say the learning style approach is ineffective, a waste of resources and potentially even damaging.

-by Sally Weale, Education correspondent, The Guardian
Sunday 12 March 2017 20.01 EDT Last modified on Monday 13 March 2017 05.46 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/13/teachers-neuromyth-learning-styles-scientists-neuroscience-education

“Teaching children according to their individual “learning style” does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists.

Thirty eminent academics from the worlds of neuroscience, education and psychology have signed a letter to the Guardian voicing their concern about the popularity of the learning style approach among some teachers.

They say it is ineffective, a waste of resources and potentially even damaging as it can lead to a fixed approach that could impair pupils’ potential to apply or adapt themselves to different ways of learning.

The group opposes the theory that learning is more effective if pupils are taught using an individual approach identified as their personal “learning style”. Some pupils, for example, are identified as having a “listening” style and could therefore be taught with storytelling and discussion rather than written exercises.

The letter describes that approach as “one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education”. It is signed by Steven Pinker, Johnstone family professor of psychology at Harvard University; Dorothy Bishop, professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford; and leading neuroscientist Prof Uta Frith of University College London among others.

School leaders say the enthusiasm for learning styles in schools has faded, but research in 2012 among teachers in the UK and Netherlands found that 80% believed individuals learned better when they received information in their preferred learning style. In 2013, research by the Wellcome Trust found that 76% of teachers had used learning styles in their teaching.

As part of international Brain Awareness Week, which starts on Monday, scientists want to raise awareness of these commonly held beliefs about how to improve learning, which are supposedly based on research but not backed up with scientific evidence.

As part of the campaign, an organisation called Speakezee is sending neuroscientists into schools to raise awareness among teachers and pupils of the latest research based on established scientific findings, and to flag up the shortcomings of the learning style approach.

“Teachers need to be armed with up-to-date evidence of what has been shown to be effective so that schools are not wasting time or money on unsubstantiated practices that do not help students,” the letter says. “It is hard to establish the cost to the education system of using learning styles. Some schools have it as part of their teaching ethos whereas others bring in external consultants or send teachers on training courses.

“Aside from the cost in terms of time and money, one concern is that learning styles leads to belief that individual students are unable to learn because the material is inappropriate.”

It continues: “The brain is essential for learning, but learning styles is just one of a number of common neuromyths that do nothing to enhance education.”

The letter, organised by Prof Bruce Hood, chair of developmental psychology in society at the University of Bristol, says most people believe they have a preferred learning style – either visual, auditory or kinesthetic – and teaching using a variety of these styles can be engaging.

“However the claim that students will perform better when the teaching is matched to their preferred sensory modality (learning style) is simply not supported by the science and of questionable value,” he said.

According to Hood, a recent poll of more than 100 head teachers of independent schools found over 85% believed in learning styles, and 66% used them in their schools with many sending teachers on courses and 6% paying for external consultants. Amounts spent ranged from nothing to over £30,000 per year, he said.

Geoff Barton, headteacher of King Edward VI school in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, who is soon to take over as general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said he hoped the age of neuromyths was over.

“I think the fad about learning styles faded long ago, and I would be surprised if many schools continued to subscribe to the approach. That said, the notion of making teaching and learning more varied in classrooms is helpful and likely to motivate a wider range of students,” he said.

“Modern neuroscience – rather than some quick-fix version of it – should help teachers and students to develop real learning, real progress and real success.”

The Educational Endowment Foundation, an independent grant-making charity, has also documented its concerns about a learning styles approach.

It said: “There is very limited evidence for any consistent set of learning ‘styles’ that can be used reliably to identify genuine differences in the learning needs of young people, and evidence suggests that it is unhelpful to assign learners to groups or categories on the basis of a supposed learning style.”

The Department for Education declined to provide a formal comment on learning styles, but a spokeswoman said it was up to teachers to decide what they wanted to use in their classrooms.”