I used to hate the term "teaching style."  Often, it had to do with the context of the conversation.  One would say, "that's just his teaching style" to justify snide remarks or angry outbursts or stacks of worksheets.  The term seemed to derive from a misconception that we, as educators, do not share a base of common professional knowledge.

Style?  It felt like a word used to describe clothing or dancing or perhaps cooking.  However, teaching had a more theoretical underpinning that transcended mere style.  If education is a science, this might make sense.  One rarely hears of a "urologist's style" or a "biologists" style of the style of pretty much any profession that ends in the suffix -ist.

Except artists.  Artists have a distinct style, despite sharing a distinct theoretical set of knowledge.  So do writers and poets and speakers.  So do musicians and counselors and politicians and pastors. In fact, "style" seems to be a word applied to any human endeavor and teaching is, at its core, a human endeavor.

This doesn't mean that all styles are effective. One can criticize music, not simply because it doesn't fit your taste, but also because it is bad music.  Similarly, one can criticize the style of a counselor who fails to help people or a poet who only uses trite phrases or a historian who spins narratives that don't have any nuance.

The reality is that all teachers have a style.  Call it an approach or a method or even, on some level, a personality.  But when I walk into a classroom, I cannot deny that beyond the science and the strategies and the documentation of what works, there is the style; and, though I can't prove it scientifically, I have a hunch that teaching style might just be the most powerful force in shaping the learning in a classroom.