In leadership we do many personality tests and have quite a few instruments based on various leadership theories; each assessment showing where you fall on the grid or categorization of leadership or personality types. So, I enjoyed the teaching perspectives inventory. As with many leadership assessments that I tend to be pretty balanced with one or two categories that just do not fit at all, such was the case for the teaching perspectives inventory. Apprenticeship was my top area, with Developmental and Nurturing not far behind; Transmission was a little lower and Social Reform was my bottom score.
I definitely related to the Apprenticeship area - and quite appropriately being in the agriculture and leadership fields where experiential learning is a key component of education. As a teacher in this area, it is crucial to know the students and their abilities to be able to adapt lessons to their skill levels. It is my duty to guide and direct them along the journey of developing skills through various experiences. I see this come through in a current class I am teaching - Introduction to Leadership and Service - as we utilize a service-learning project for students to apply leadership concepts in a service capacity. And, when a true experience is not possible, we utilize multi-media to offer a common situation for all to discuss a particular topic.
Developmental and Nurturing perspectives also are easy to relate to for me, as leadership is a continuous process of development. In the classroom, I find reflective questions and discussion among the students to be a great asset in challenging assumptions and promoting further reflection and deeper thoughts on processes and human interactions relating to leadership. Sharing experiences is also helpful for all students to gain a broader perspective and tool box of scenarios. As an instructor, adaptability is key to roll with the experiences and stories that students share, finding ways to connect them back to course content. Along the journey, I can not help but be encouraging and supportive of the students' efforts, as that is simply a part of who I am. I believe that positivity is an important ingredient in the leadership classroom, as creating a space that is safe and trustworthy for students to share their experiences is of critical importance!
Overall, I feel like my teaching perspective focuses primarily on the student or learner, then how to connect their experiences with content and finally how can I share an experience that may tie all together around the ideals and context of the particular topic we are discussing. Throughout the educational journey in the leadership classroom, I think it is so important for educators to have feedback and give feedback to students. I think this was a great instrument and summary article to provide a spring board of ideas to think about which perspective or combination of perspectives each has when approaching the classroom.
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One of the things that I found most interesting about the Teaching Perspectives results was how different everyone's dominant perspectives came out to be. When I got my results back I thought, "oh yeah, that's how people teach", so it was interesting to see how other peoples' graphs came out completely differently than mine. Nurturing, for example, scored pretty low on my perspectives, but I can see from your blog, as well as your results, that for you it is an important value. I wonder how much our choice of field and our perspectives on teaching are tied together; it would be interesting to compare teaching perspectives across departments to see how much intra vs inter departmental variety there is in teaching styles.
ReplyDeleteDespite nurturing not emerging as one of my dominant perspective, I don't want to have negativity in the classroom preventing students from exploring ideas. I have had a few science classes that have used discussion as a way of exploring ideas, but I have not found them particularly effective to deconstructing students' preconceived ideas. We typically focus on discussing ways published studies could be improved. I would like to hear specific ways you use the nurturing perspective in your teaching, and how you encourage students to question their ideas via discussion. I also agree with Jayna that an inter and intra field comparison of teaching perspectives would be intriguing.
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