My dominant perspective is Apprenticeship

Here are my results from the TPI survey:

Transmission			33	Apprenticeship			40	Developmental			26	Nurturing			39	Social reform			32
B	I	A		B	I	A		B	I	A		B	I	A		B	I	A
11	10	12		13	14	13		8	6	12		14	13	12		11	11	10

Beliefs total: 57                                                 Intentions total: 54                  Action total: 59
Overall Total: 170

TPI means teaching Perspective Inventory. It was created by Dan Pratt and John B. Collins from the University of British Columbia. (TPI) is a tool made for the purpose of assisting teachers in reflecting on their practice and identifying characteristics that perhaps were not obvious to them. The inventory comprises of a questionnaire and the analysis of the answers. The main five key teaching perspective included in this inventory are transmission, apprenticeship, developmental, nurturer and Social Reform. The overall scores of the five perspectives are again composed of three smaller internal scores of beliefs, intentions, and actions. These sub-scores can be summarized as actions are what teachers do, intentions are what teachers want to accomplish, and beliefs are why teachers feel actions are important

My brief interpretation of the 5 perspectives: Transmission (content driven, enthusiast of the subject matter, timely feedback), Apprenticeship (excellent practitioner, attempts to understand the developmental phase of the students, guiding students from simple tasks to independence and engaging student with zone of development), Developmental (considers the content from the perspective of the student, frequently uses examples and questions, focus on more sophisticated forms of reasoning), Nurturer (focuses on the learner’s motivation and self-confidence, understands that students can succeed if they make an effort and are well supported, cares about learning process) and finally Social Reform (considers values and ideologies, believes that changing students is a way of affecting society, encourages critical and inclusive practices).

As mentioned in above figure, my overall TPI score is 170 and the dominant perspective in my view of teaching is apprenticeship which scores 40 point. Moreover, according to my Teaching Perspectives Profile above, my recessive perspectives is development which scores 26 point. From the TPI outputs, it can be concluded that my effective teaching methods are derived of a combination of Apprenticeship and Nurturing perspectives. However, the rest of the perspectives namely transmission and social reform are neither dominant nor recessive. Even though the scores are different in each perspective I believe that each perspective is important because every learner learns in different ways at different paces. One approach may suit a group of students, and another approach may be more encouraging for another group.

By reflecting on my TPI score I should focus more on developmental perspective of teaching, since it helps the learner to focus more on  their viewpoint. However, it is a great challenge for me to focus this area as my students were not up to the expected standard and they were not being practised before by different teaching strategies. Anyhow, as time passes I believe that I can learn the individual differences and I can help them to improve developmental perspective in teaching.

To sum up, I would like to say that this report enabled me to learn the different teaching perspectives that I can apply in order to develop student competences and more importantly it shows in what ways I can  guide the sessions and recognize my own orientations in teaching profession.