I actually completed the Teaching Perspectives Inventory very soon after our last meeting even though I’m only getting around to blogging about it now. The only problem I had with it was that I didn’t really understand what “practitioner” meant in that context (or, moreso, how to transfer that phrase into thinking about my classroom, though I think I get it more now after reading the paragraphs on the five perspectives), so my answers on questions involving the word “practitioner” were probably a little random. But overall the results felt comfortable to me when I saw them. I had not read the descriptions or categories at all ahead of time because I didn’t want the models/categories to shape my answers to what kind of perspective I WISHED I had or thought I SHOULD have.
My feedback clustered strongly, with three areas at or around the Dominant line and two just below the Recessive line.
Dominant(ish) perspectives: My most dominant perspective was Developmental, at 39 points (just over the line). The description of it seems a little too structured for how I would think of my actual teaching practice– while it is true that I will develop questions for large and small discussion or for writing prompts that push students to more complex engagement with literature or theory, I also follow the students’ interests pretty fluidly during a given class period ( I guess that’s part of the “bridging knowledge” part of the definition? I’m not quite sure what that description means, but it is important to me that students think about our work in the context of their own lives, cultures, beliefs). And as for “adapting” knowledge to “learners’ level of understanding,” I’m not sure… I am certainly not a professor who talks in heavy jargon, dismisses my students’ intellectual strengths, assumes everyone should come to college ready to produce at the highest level– but I think I’m also someone who keeps a pretty consistently high bar of difficulty and isn’t willing to lower it much, for better or for worse.
My second highest, at 37 points, was Nurturing, with Social Reform coming in third at 35. The descriptions here were also interesting to me. Because my students tend to cast me in a maternal persona (“It’s like taking a class with your mom if your mom had a potty mouth,” as one was recently overheard to say– now that’s a proud moment), I think “nurturing” is part of my personal interaction with students as a mentor. But the description of the Nurturing perspective as one in which students are “working on issues or problems without fear of failure” or where effort is assessed like achievement is not accurate to my teaching practice (see above re: demanding expectations). There is probably disparity here between what I do in the full classroom and when I grade vs. how I interact with students one-on-one in supporting their learning, or understand their learning as one thing in a complex life. On the other hand, a supportive and intimate community of learners is essential to my concept of education, and I foster it actively and place myself as a clear part of it. I don’t see this as antithetical or in tension with high expectations, or with bringing some authority to the classroom from my years of immersion in a discipline that, frankly, no student could replicate alone in one semester. In fact, I think I can push my students harder and farther because they feel they are in a safe environment, including safe to fail. For Social Reform, I’d say that the description that “the object of teaching is the collective rather than the individual” is definitely NOT true of my perspective– indeed, is far from it. On the other hand, I do certainly challenge the status quo, deconstruct hegemonic ideologies and institutions and practices, and hope that students will internalize and embody what they learn in every class I teach.
Lastly, the categories of Transmission and Apprenticeship both fell below the Recessive line at 28 points. This also seems pretty accurate to me in terms of how the perspective translates into practice, but it’s not because I’m not passionate about my content. I am. I believe the content I teach matters, and I mean that at every level. But “mastery” isn’t part of my worldview, nor really is summary, correction, or teacherly presentation of content. Apprenticeship is something that I think comes a little naturally as I get to know students and assess what their needs are, and I think the idea of socialing students into new discourses and practices was a large part of how I was taught to think about education as a graduate student. But now I’d say this is a fluid perspective/practice for me, not an essential part of my pedagogical theory.
You know, the Dominant-ish descriptions all felt more accurate to me when I read them than when I tried to write about them here. I think the categories clustered because parts of each inform my perspective, but parts of each also, then, do not match how I would describe my own philosophy and practice as a teacher. It is clear to me that collective and collaborative learning is essential to my pedagogy, and that developing a communal classroom is part of that, one in which I am also always positioned as a learner. We all bring types of knowledge and experience to that community, and mine happens to be one that includes a deep understanding of the texts and discipline, among other things, as well as a devotion to the content of that discipline. But I see my students as active makers of our communal knowledge and design assignments that position them as such. And I care that I am at a college where I know them as people as well as a series of scores. I’m frankly nervous about translating these things into an online environment.