On May 24, the 2011 CTLT Institute kicked-off with an opening session entitled Exploring Variations on a Theme of Highly Effective Teaching. During this interactive session, Dan Pratt provided an overview of eight research-based qualities of highly effective teachers that apply to the five perspectives of teaching. He also opened up a discussion for attendees to compare and interpret their own Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI), an inventory created by Dan and his colleague, John Collins, to help teachers assess their teaching style. Dan is a professor of Adult and Higher Education and a Senior Scholar within the Centre for Health Education Scholarship (CHES). Most notably, Dan was the recipient of Canada’s most prestigious university teaching award in 2008, the 3M National Teaching Fellowship, and is the author of many articles in adult education.
Attendees at the session included members from a variety of disciplines within the UBC community and included faculty, librarians, grad students, post docs, and UBC staff. With such a diverse mix of educators in the audience, Dan began the session by introducing the fundamental idea of a “plurality of the good.” This is a simple idea that reminds teachers not to buy into the notion of an orthodox good style of teaching. Dan proceeded to dissect this idea and examined the framework of teaching perspectives, and stated to the audience that, “We can’t all look alike, because we teach different things, to different people, and emphasize different goals.”
With the need to adapt different teaching styles across the different academic disciplines, instructors were invited to consider eight researched-based qualities of highly effective teachers and five perspectives of teaching to provide insight into effective teaching. Dan emphasized that each quality and perspective is best suited to specific instructors and the contexts in which they teach. They are also specific to an instructor’s educational goals and values. No single perspective on teaching is inherently better than any other. Furthermore, the tools and techniques of teaching, along with signature pedagogies, should also be taken into consideration. From this framework, the audience learned that teaching perspectives are comprised of three aspects: beliefs, intentions, and actions. These basic aspects are illustrated through three questions:
Beliefs: What do you believe about learning?
Intentions: What do you want people to learn?
Actions: What do you do that is strategic to achieving your intentions?
While there are many ways to approach these questions, they collectively give rise to the five perspectives and are the essential aspects that differentiate one perspective from another. Dan explained that they are not just ways of teaching; they are characteristics of who you are as a teacher and what community you belong to as a teacher.
The eight research-based qualities of highly effective teachers (from several disciplines) as noted by Dan are:
- Knowledge: Have complex and interconnected knowledge structures related to essential questions, evidence, debates, or issues in their field or discipline.
- Engagement: Know that learning is improved when people are actively engaged in both encoding and retrieving of information.
- Role Modeling: Know they teach more by what they do than by what they say.
- Zone of Development: Teach to the learners’ zone of proximal development in their respective field or discipline.
- Organizing Frameworks: Build their teaching around frameworks, such as, threshold concepts or big questions that help students understand, organize, and recall information.
- Prior Knowledge: Know that students’ prior knowledge can help or hinder learning.
- Provision of Feedback: Provide students with feedback in advance of, and separate from, high stakes accountability.
- Perception of Assessment: Know that students’ learning is influenced by their perception of how they will be assessed.
The five perspectives on teaching and its mandates are as follows:
- Transmission: Effective teaching requires a substantial commitment to the content or subject matter.
- Apprenticeship: Effective teaching is a process of socializing students into new behavioural norms and professional 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 as much as it does from the head.
- Social Reform: Effective teaching seeks to change society in substantive ways.
Based on research from more than 150,000 educators from 105 countries, findings suggest that a large number of teachers view one of the above perspectives as their dominant view of teaching, with one or two perspectives as ‘back-ups.’ Dan’s extensive cultural experiences in teaching have allowed him to witness this pattern amongst a large number of teachers in adult and/or higher education. Many teachers hold these back-up perspectives so that they are able to adapt to changes under various educational circumstances without deviating too far from their dominant view. Dan continued to highlight this important aspect by guiding the audience through a reflection and discussion of their own TPI profiles.
Upon deconstructing a sample TPI profile, Dan pointed out the two distinguishing score boundaries that essentially categorize TPI scores into three perspectives: dominant, back-up, and recessive. In helping the audience further understand their own TPI results, Dan noted that the dominant and recessive boundaries are not dependent on one another. These lines are individually calculated, and its discrepancies are varied throughout the six signature pedagogies (Social Sciences, Humanities, Health, Math, Education, and Basic Sciences) as presented by Dan. For example, educators in Math scored low in Social Reform, and high in Transmission (consistent with the nature of their discipline). In contrast, educators in the Social Sciences tended to score low in the Transmission Perspective, and high in Social Reform.
Before breaking into group discussion, Dan asked the audience to ponder an important message: your TPI profile should reflect “who you would like to be, rather than who you’re compelled to be.” The creation of the TPI inventory was not meant to be used as a diagnostic tool of strengths or weaknesses, but rather as a discussion tool used to help educators highlight how they want to be seen throughout their different roles as a teacher, colleague, or scholar. Dan’s message also shed light for certain audience members whose profiles were based on the reality of their situation, rather than their individual preferences, clarifying that sometimes a TPI profile is more of an indication of our compliance with a department or unit, than it is a clear indication of our preferred ways to teach. During this exercise, Dan encouraged audience members to compare their TPI with other evidence or indicators of their approach to teaching, such as student/peer evaluations, and reflect upon any aspects of their teaching that might warrant further investigation.
At the end of the session, Dan encouraged all attendees to utilize the TPI as a form of self learning. Some examples included using the TPI as support for developing your teaching philosophy statement, preparing for teaching evaluations, engaging in faculty development, seeking student feedback, and developing research projects. Dan ended the session by affirming one central principle that holds true across all five teaching perspectives: “What is learned is more important than what is taught.”
Recommended reading:
- Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education by Daniel D. Pratt and Associates
- Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity by Etienne Wenger
- Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts by Sam Wineburg
- How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching by Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro and Marsha C. Lovett
- Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage by Paulo Freire
- Preventing Death by Lecture by Sharon Bowman
- Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Jean Lave & Etienne Wenger
- The Courage to Teach by Parker Palmer
- What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain
The lesson on Exploring the theme of Highly Effective Teaching is very effective and I will want to take it and some other courses from your outfit. thank you.