In examining my profile sheet, it shows that Apprenticeship perspective is my dominant perspective as a teacher. Transmission, Nurturing and Developmental perspective respectively followed.
The four perspectives such as Apprenticeship, Transmission, Nurturing and Developmental have overall high scores that range from 40 except the Social Reform perspective. It means to say that they are all in or above the mean.
There is a step-like differentiation in my profile though they have a minimal range. As I was completing the TPI I keep a single specific educational context and a single group of learners in mind throughout, that is— Science with Grades 7-9 or lower secondary class.
Apprenticeship represent my most strongly held views on my role and function as a teacher while Transmission and Nurturing are my back up perspectives since they are also high but lower than my dominant perspective. Social reform becomes my recessive perspective since it is below the average or the mean.
In checking for internal consistency, my beliefs and actions (15) in transmission perspective are aligned with each other while my intensions (13) have two marks difference to my beliefs and actions. In apprenticeship perspective, my beliefs and intentions are aligned with each other (15) while my action (14) has one mark difference to my beliefs and intentions. In developmental perspective, my beliefs (15) are one mark difference to my intentions (14) and 3 marks difference to my action (12). In nurturing perspective, my beliefs (14) are one mark difference to my intensions (15) and one mark difference to my actions (13) while my actions have two marks difference to my intensions. Therefore, I can say that there is quite a high internal consistency in the four perspectives except for Social reform wherein inconsistency occur about my beliefs (9) which has 3 marks difference to my intensions (12) and 4 marks difference to my action (13).
As I look for consistency across perspectives, intentions under my dominant perspective — the Apprenticeship and including my back up perspective — the Nurturing perspective both got the highest marks. Similarly, Apprenticeship, Transmission and Developmental perspectives all got the highest marks in beliefs while only in transmission perspective that it has the highest score in actions.
As a whole, my intentions are greater than my actions and beliefs which ideally must be aligned with each other.
Implications:
The diagram below shows how the five perspectives were rated in the test. Apprenticeship got the highest mark while social reform got the lowest mark.
The result on my profile sheet also showed that I am highly skilled in what I teach to the class. I know what my students can independently do depending on their given abilities and what they can do with guidance. I apply scaffolding to students who have weak abilities as they are guided through the process of doing tasks. However, as they become more competent I lessen my intervention but instead give them more complex tasks to develop their optimum skills along the course of the learning process. In this case I focus on student’s zone pf proximal development (ZPD). I measure students learning based on what they can do as a product of what they gain from the class lecture or discussion instead of how much information they memorize from the given lecture or discussion. Activities are more on the application of what has been learned rather than what information has been absorbed. Example, in doing mathematical problem about density (D = M/V), students must not literally memorize the formula on how to solve the problem but instead learn to analyse the given problem as to what is present in the formula (given, missing variable and how to derive the formula from the given formula); like if they see a unit of g, kg or pounds it means to say that it refers to the mass of an object and if they see a unit of ml, cm3 or liters it refers to the volume of an object; and if they see a unit like see g/cm3 of kg/ m3 it refers to density. By demonstrating on how to carry out the process, students can do the task independently or with little assistance from the teacher making them develop their competence as the learning process continues.
On the contrary, sometimes transmission perspective works especially when we have a set of topics to be covered in a specific period of time. In this case, I divide the class period into three stages known as the primary-recency effect: the prime time which is the time of giving information (content), the down time where students practice what they have studied and closure to give the clarification and summary of the lesson. As students understand the lesson being discussed, this can speed up their performance when they are given a task but if they never understand what was discussed and so their performance may lag. This makes our learning time not exciting at all as students struggle to understand and do the tasks given to them.
Other times I am a nurturing teacher where I care about students’ self-efficacy by motivating them to view learning as a fun and exciting journey and by considering problems as challenges of achieving learning goals so they need to try their best to achieve the goal. In this case, students emotions; and their need for reassurance that what they are doing is right so they can proceed to the next step really matters. If no assurance is given, students tend to be stuck in a given task that makes them disappointed and not engaged in learning.
At times, I am a developmental teacher in a sense that I have to put myself in the situation of students so they can understand the subject matter. I think of ways on how I can deliver the lesson based from the level of understanding of the students by giving guide questions from simple to complex that develop their critical thinking and figure out the answer by themselves. I also give concrete examples or situations that they can relate to that will facilitate easy understanding of the topic. In this manner, students find meaning in what they are learning.
Conversely, I know by the time I took the test that I will have a lower mark in social reforms due to my belief that reform must start from within us. If we want our society to change, that change must start from us personally. However, I never thought that my action would justify this notion of mine as what is shown in my profile sheet where action score is higher than my beliefs and intensions.
All the information mentioned above, were realizations of what I actually do in the classroom. It opens my eyes to the fact that even though there are several perspectives on how we teach, still we are more inclined to one specific type of perspective rather than a combination of all five perspectives. However, my profile sheet shows that if we held strong views on one perspective, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we lack the rest of the five perspectives when we teach. All teachers embody the five perspectives only to varying degrees of priority and in different time or setting of learning. Also, we can be in one perspective to another depending on what we believe in, what we want to do and how we can carry out what we want to do in the class. Moreover, being aware of the realities of five perspectives give me an idea that there’s more than one avenues on how we can be an effective teacher. Lastly, by doing the TPI made me realize as to who am I as a teacher and how I influenced the life, identity and ways of thinking of my students as we learn.
Based from the TPI test and the explanation of the author (Daniel Pratt et.al), the following information will form part of my teaching philosophy: Learning is student-centered. The learning environment gives students the opportunity to become life-long learners as they are exposed to lessons that will let them be engage and in collaboration with other students in the class. Classroom activities will also focus on developing student’s self-efficacy, critical thinking and environmental awareness in a way that they can apply what they learn from school into their daily life activities and as citizen of the country where they belong.
What’s my next step?
Letting my colleague take the test:
I did the TPI last Tuesday (June 7) and I was amazed about its result and so I asked three of my colleagues to do the same way. They are all male. The Filipino computer teacher.The American English teacher the American Health teacher.Though we teach different subjects but we belong to the same department (English Program). So the result was, my Filipino colleague was more inclined to transmission perspective, while the English teacher was more on developmental perspective and the Health teacher has a combination of developmental and nurturing perspective. The Computer teacher and the English teacher both got the recessive perspective on social reform while the health teacher has transmission perspective as recessive. However, one thing we agreed upon was, we belong to the same department and we teach the same group of class (Grades 7-9) but with different subjects and we have varying teaching perspectives. In this case, our students experienced learning in different perspectives as they learn different subjects. We laugh as we matched our way of teaching to the result that we got from TPI and they all agreed that TPI gave them the clear idea of who they are as a teacher and direction as to what their main focus when they are teaching (whether the lesson is teacher-centered or student centered). However, they made a comment that based from the review of literature of the study, the research done for TPI was based on teachers teaching native speaker students whereas we (as teachers) are teaching students in their second language which greatly influence the way we teach them.
Letting my students take the test:
I followed the suggestion of Dan Pratt from teachingperspectives.com to let five of my students from Grades 8 and 9 to do the TPI by using my name and email address. So they are pretending to be me as they mark the test considering me as a great influence on how they learn. The result also varies from one student to another. For dominant perspective, two students got the result as developmental perspective, two students got nurturing perspective and one got the transmission perspective. For recessive perspective, four students got the transmission perspective while one student got the developmental perspective. Therefore, if students were given the chance to see their teacher based from the five perspectives, every student will describe a different type of perspective depending on how their learning was influence by the way the teacher teach them.
So, by considering the type of learner that I have; the content that I will teach and the ways on how I teach the content, my teaching perspective may change without making a total shift of inclining myself to a perspective that doesn’t define who am I as a teacher. Since type of learners is different it is understood that we need to create a lesson that suits their need and ability. Deciding what perspectives to use needs deliberate thinking of the what, why and how of teaching and the assumptions and justifications that lies behind the five perspectives.
image source: for students taking the test: http://images.clipartpanda.com/computer-clipart-for-kids-computer-lab-clipart-for-kids.jpg teachers taking the test: http://images.clipartpanda.com/english-teacher-clipart-0511-0810-2000-1420_Nerdy_Computer_Teacher_clipart_image.jpg
Marieta Dichoso 