March 2012: Teaching Perspectives Inventory

March 2012:  Teaching Perspectives Inventory

My teaching  philosophy is described here Teaching Philosophy and some of the findings pertaining to my teaching perspectives are here TPI Results for Srikanth. For those of you unfamiliar with the teaching perspectives, this document TPI – Teaching Perspectives Summaries gives the necessary background information. The hypothesis is that many teachers, consciously or otherwise, subscribe to one or two ‘dominant’ perspectives on teaching, and hold on to one ‘back-up’ perspective. The five perspectives identified from the survey are less likely to be dominant for any given teacher. For example, from my teaching perspective survey results, I learnt that the two dominant perspectives that influence my present teaching are “Apprenticeship” and “Nurturing,” with the backup perspective being “Developmental”. High internal consistency (sub-scores within one or two points of each other) within the dominant perspectives mean  that my Beliefs, Intentions, and Actions all corroborate each other.   Somewhat surprisingly to my own education, I discovered that “Social Reform” is least on my agenda.  Am I a ‘stereotypical’ Engineer on whose checklist “Social Reform” is the last  agenda item? Apparently so from this survey. I am interested to learn more from my peers as to what they discovered about their perspectives. After all said and done, these perspectives are identified based on responses given to an online questionnaire. I found this process quite rewarding as I had to confront questions that  I did not think about earlier in great detail. I will be interested to revisit this survey in the future, perhaps a year from now.

I have re-taken the TPI on 4th March 2012, right towards the end of the SoTL course, to see whether my perspectives have been influenced by my readings and reflections during the course of this program. The results are here TPI Results for Srikanth-2.  A comparative analysis of the two TPI results will follow now.

Not surprisingly, given my disciplinary background in Engineering, Apprenticehship turns out to be the dominant perspective in both TPI results. This perspective has the strongest intent score in both sets of results.  I wonder whether the dominant perspective is shaped by the educational expectations of a discipline and environments in which we expect our students to function.  Engineering is as much a skills driven discipline as it is knowledge driven. The fundamental sciences come into action in synchrony to metamorphose into a product or a process. Achieving this requires the nurturing of engineering design skills under the able guidance of practitioners who have the benefit of experience, if not knowledge.

To my surprise, I discovered that Nurturing is my fallback perspective. I suspect this may be to do with my cultural upbringing and my mentors.  As I look back on my teaching evaluations over the past few years, I found that my students notice this facet of my teaching.

I did not know how to interpret my first TPI results. But, after listening to Dr. Dan Pratt and re-taking the TPI a clearer picture seem to emerge.  It will be interesting to ask students to take a TPI to seek out what they expect from a teacher? This is one of the take home action items for future.