Teaching Perspectives Inventory Score

Teaching Perspectives Inventory has helped me to realize my outlook towards teaching. It also helped me to understand the type teaching I have adapted and realize the reasons for my preferred methods of teaching particularly making it clear that different types of teaching will needed depending on the motive of teaching. 

TPI helped me to identify that my dominant teaching perspective was “transmission” that represented my roles and functions as a teacher. “Transmission” is also inevitable when the lessons are dense in content and time bound. My back up perspective was “apprenticeship” which was also high but less than “transmission”. “Social reform” was my recessive teaching perspective. TPI also indicated that while I strongly held to “transmission” and “apprenticeship” (score 42 and 39 respectively), the remaining scores were markedly different,  i.e. 34 and 33 in “Developmental” and “Nurturing” respectively. The “Social reform” score fell way below (25).

In “transmission” my beliefs were closely parallel to my intentions and actions (B: 13, I: 14, A:15). These consistencies further helped me to ratify myself. However there were mild discrepancies on belief against intentions and actions in other perspectives which were mostly attributed by time constraints. Over all my scores were consistent with how I see myself as a teacher. 

TPI score may make a teacher believe that his/her dominant perspective is his/her only preferred perspective. However this is always not true as most teachers will utilize more than one perspective allowing them to accommodate rolling batches of students and curriculums that are being regularly updated. 

The TPI instrument was simple, accessible, free, user friendly and its use didn’t consume much time. The process of completing TPI helped me to categorize the different aspects of teaching which was otherwise utilized randomly. The perception of clearly demarcated categories would help to organize ourselves as teachers in making our lesson plans directed towards achieving a specific goal. Despite the complexities of adult teaching TPI had enabled us to easily and clearly identify a handful of qualitative perspectives of teaching. It will invariably contribute to address any inconsistencies in our teaching and perhaps revise our teaching philosophy.