I don’t think the results were necessarily a complete surprise, instead they confirmed much about what I knew about my facilitation style. Facilitation of continuing medical education is often quite rigid and sometimes can be at the direction of a higher authority in terms of content, but also the actual material. The one surprising bit is the lower level of Transmission in my TPI. There is the approved/mandatory content much of the time and information needs to be passed on to the learners however, I attempt to take a different approach to teaching it when possible. What this tells me is I value and try and push for allowing opportunities for the students to learn in different methods including hands-on where possible with skills. Additionally, the goal is to think about more complex problems. Most of my students are experienced in the field and my job is to help them build on their skills and assessment techniques. With respect to what I have proposed, there is some things to think about. The content is relevant, and there is a need to have it presented. The focus on having the information presented to people with experience and building on their experiences in the developmental style and additionally adding in as much content that would focus on techniques including demonstrations from subject matter experts either from the ER or from other expertise will be instrumental in helping impart the skills needed for a thorough assessment. That is so say, I believe my style and goals of the session would align very well. 

As I mentioned above, nurturing and apprenticeship are my top two teaching perspectives. Given the population of students I work with, this was not surprising to me at all. Developmental (39) and Transmission were my third-highest scores. Keeping the developmental perspective in mind, educators design/teach lessons based on the learners' levels of understanding and ways of thinking. I am constantly adapting my lessons based on the cohort of students in my course. How I deliver content to one class may be completely opposite to how I deliver to another. The transmission perspective indicates that I believe “effective teaching requires a substantial commitment to the content or subject matter” (TPI, 2023). I believe this to be an accurate result. I am 100% confident in teaching in my course. If something doesn’t go as planned, I have mastery of the subject matter/content, which means I can quickly pivot without impacting student learning.  My TPI Profile Sheet indicates that my subscores for each perspective (Beliefs, Intentions and Actions) were aligned with each other. This is consistent with how I see myself as an educator and honours my core values. 

 

I was not surprised by either dominant trait as these are factors that we considered when structuring or sessions and writing our learning pledge. We want to ensure that we are providing effective and efficient knowledge transfer, building confidence in a safe space without fear of judgement or fatalities. Based on this exercise I would like to develop and strengthen my social reform point of view. I think that I often side with practicality and the humanistic approach to learning/facilitating, and often shy away from social reform and social change. Historically I viewed social change from a radical viewpoint, more so than the everyday application. In healthcare there are so many opportunities for social change that could greatly improve quality of care for patients and communities as a whole.

My dominant perspectives are apprenticeship and transmission, which aligns with my prediction during the readings. St. Clair discusses the five educational philosophies that are related to practice. While reading this section of the article, I identified that I am aligned with the liberal and humanist philosophies of education. Liberal educators are concerned with making sure their students master the content, while humanist educators focus more on facilitating development. While the liberal philosophy is consistent with the two perspectives I identified, I was surprised to find that I am also a humanist. I believe this is because while I understand that the goal of my job is to transmit knowledge and to teach hard skills, my overall philosophy would be different if I were teaching different content. St. Clair identifies in their article that teachers like me whose philosophies do not align with their teaching perspectives will face tensions. Understanding that this is the case for me is very helpful and will help me develop a unique approach to my apprenticeship and transmission style courses.

 

St. Clair, R. (2015). Creating courses for adults: Design for learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, p. 3-21.

My dominant perspective is transmission with apprenticeship following close behind.  I found my results interesting but not surprising.  My experiences as an educator in post-secondary pertain to introducing skills and then building on set skills.  Learning objectives are clearly defined as well as expected outcomes as the programs are accountable to accreditation regulators.  Transmission learning is a large part of ‘getting that knowledge across’ and if students are unable to grasp foundational skills, then progression of these skills is difficult.  My facilitation style certainly supports information of skills/content including practical components being transferred to students.  Much like St. Clair (2015) refers transmission learning as involving content experts with specific and approved content to pass on to students. 

Further reflection and consideration of this weeks readings, I can certainly agree with St. Clair (2015), “teachers have a strong tendency to adopt a teaching style that they would enjoy is they were students” (p.5).  My first three program completions were college based with specific content transmission as the facilitation style.  I excelled and enjoyed the cut/dry content and feeling my skills progress for my intending career.  

Lastly, I am slightly disappointed I was not more “evolved” with my results.  University education has opened my eyes to a “larger picture” and I hope one day I can adopt a more social reform facilitation style.  I want to encourage, introduce, assist, or even nurture students to ‘critically think’ for themselves and be more aware of what is happening in their immediate space or in the world.  

St.Clair, R. (2015). Creating courses for adults: Design for learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

My dominant teaching perspective is social reform (41) and my second dominant (36) is nurturing.

There were only small gaps between my beliefs, intentions and actions, 2 points at the most in any of these three outcomes. I was surprised to see very little difference between my beliefs, intentions, and actions as I sometimes feel like I’m not fully aligned in my teaching approaches. 

Considering the topic and the needs of the department and students (and ultimately their clients), the core teaching perspective for this session would be social reform but this perspective also needs to be balanced with a nurturing perspective. A nurturing perspective is necessary as the concepts we’re learning can be challenging to deeply held beliefs and students need to be comfortable and supported in order to learn (St. Clair, 2015, p. 14). 

This session includes content that may be new to some of the students but is focused on offering learners the opportunity to consider their own beliefs and values about gender. We look at history and social norms as well as structural forces such as capitalism and racism to critically evaluate gender expectations and stereotypes in an effort to know ourselves better and become more aware of how our beliefs may inform interactions with clients. This reflects the social reform approach as it’s encouraging students to consider “who is represented and who is omitted from the dominant discourse” (Teaching Perspectives Inventory, 2020.)

In considering the nurturing perspective that is also needed to achieve the goals of this session, I relate to the statement that “Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart, not the head (Teaching Perspectives Inventory, 2020).” If all students in the classroom don’t feel supported in their learning efforts, we won’t be able to meet our objectives in this class. This is where I really need to focus my efforts. 

St Clair, R. (2015). Creating Courses for Adults: Design for Learning. John Wiley & Sons.

Teaching Perspectives Inventory. (2020). Retrieved May 17, 2023, from http://www.teachingperspectives.com/tpi/

As noted in the title, my dominant perspective was Apprenticeship (40), followed by Nurturing (39). As I normally teach little guys at a Montessori school, I struggled with some of the questions for the TPI. It was sometimes hard for me to remember that I was answering the questions based on a fictional workshop for adults and not what I do every day. In those cases, I tried to imagine myself doing a parent workshop but my results may have been slightly skewed by my everyday teaching. 

The Apprenticeship score was not surprising given that I would want the participants in my workshop to partake in as many of the activities as possible during the workshop. I am also not shocked with my nurturing score as I would want my “students” to be as comfortable as possible to be able to learn. What I did find a bit surprising was the difference between my intent for nurturing (15) and my actions (10). I would have thought the actions would have been just as high if this was something I value. 

I also found it interesting (and I will have to mull over why a bit more) that my intentions and actions were so far apart for my Transmission score (a difference of 12 points). I am not sure why that is… Somehow, despite not trying to be transmissive, I guess I am?  Maybe something to work on?

Given that I would like to do a hands-on type of workshop with enough information for people to go home and keep using what they have learned, I think my perspectives might be fairly well suited for this workshop. 

My dominant perspective was transmission, which I think aligns with my teaching style in some ways, and misaligns in others. Transmission perspective talks about the teacher having mastery of the subject matter or content, and ensuring they are taking the learners through different tasks which will lead to content mastery. This is one area I felt my true teaching style wasn’t accurately reflected in this perspective because the goal of my workshop is not for the student to master the content/techniques. It is more so to perform them to a set standard, while keeping the clients safe. Mastery of a practical skill comes with many hours of application and practice, and since much of my teaching outside this workshop is at the college level, often with students who are very new to massage, I can’t expect total mastery of the practical content. However, I do align with a lot of other elements of the transmission perspective detailed by Pratt, such as ‘providing clear objectives to my students [as laid out in the course outline], adjusting the pace of lecturing, correcting errors, providing feedback/reviews, and developing objective means of assessing learning’ (Pratt Inventory). In the case of my 1-day workshop, it would be expected that the instructor provides necessary feedback for growth and learning to take place. 

My second dominant perspective was Apprenticeship. This perspective seems to jive a little more closely with my teaching style, as it discusses that effective teachers are “highly skilled practitioners of what they teach and find a way to translate that into language that is meaningful and accessible to learners.” The Pratt Inventory also mentions that the apprenticeship perspective gives students the opportunity to be involved in the work through ordered tasks which usually progress from simple to complex. This point is key in massage therapy, and in many other practical courses, as the more advanced techniques develop last. “As learners mature and become more competent, the role of a teacher changes; they offer less direction and give more responsibility as students progress from dependent learners to independent workers” (Pratt Inventory). This would be the goal of the prenatal workshop – as it progresses, the learners become more confident and require less and less feedback from the teacher. 

I feel that both these teaching perspectives have a close link with behavioural learning theory discussed by Merriam and Bierema, which I consider to be closely linked to the practical portion of a massage therapy program or workshop. 

References:

Pratt, D.D. and Associates (1998/2005). Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education, Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing.

 

My dominant teaching perspectives when considering this learning scenario were Nurturing and Developmental. I am not surprised by this result. I have very much adopted a nurturing perspective of teaching over the last few years and the results have been extremely rewarding for not only my learners, but me as well. 

This perspective very much aligns with the learning scenario I proposed. The nature of the workshop could produce transformative effects and reveal thoughts and assumptions that could evoke feelings of shame. Learners need to feel that they will be supported, cared for, and not judged through that process. I am surprised that I did not score higher on the social reform perspective when considering this scenario. However, I will admit I had a hard time staying in the context of the scenario and not everyday teaching. 
 
After reading about all of the perspectives, I see my teaching practices in all of them at different times – possibly because of different learners or different topics.

My dominant perspectives are Nurturing and Apprenticeship. 

I did not notice any gaps between actions and belief. 

My result helped me confirm my facilitation style. I already had some understanding of the nurturing learning and apprenticeship style. As a facilitator, I prefer to foster self confidence and self-esteem. I do believe also that students need clear objectives, and that evaluation is an important part of curriculum and instruction. 

As a vocational facilitator, I work with learners who are looking to learn the skills to be able to access the job market. For this reason, I identify with the Apprenticeship style. 

I think it is also important to develop skills in every style because learners learn in different ways.