I have completed the Teaching Perspectives Index from Teaching Perspectives, the results of which are shown below.
The four characteristics1 that are measured by the TPI are:
- Transmission: Effective teaching requires a substantial commitment to the content or subject matter.
- Apprenticeship: Effective teaching is a process of socialising students into new behavioural norms and ways of working.
- Developmental: Effective teaching must be planned and conducted from the learner's point of view.
- Nurturing: Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart, not the head.
- Social reform: Effective teaching seeks to change society in substantive ways.
Clearly, my emphasis is on the Developmental aspects, and I place the least emphasis on Social Reform. The relatively low score on Social Reform is particularly interesting to me, when I consider that my desire to teach is based on a desire to contribute to society. I think this highlights an assumption of mine, that the more sophisticated reasoning that people, including students, are capable of, the more likely they are to engage in social reform. Having said that, whilst that is my assumption, I'm not sure it is valid.
Interestingly, in my highest scoring area Developmental, contains my highest scores for Beliefs, Intentions, and Actions (the B, I, and A scores at the top of each column).
I would like to have some specific feedback from my peers and students if they see me in the same way as the TPI.
1 Detailed descriptions of this four characteristics are available.