Pratt TPI

Having just been introduced to the Five Teaching Perspectives, and having read about them now for the first time, having just completed the TPI and seen my results, I find that I not only agree with the results, but conversely I'm a bit surprised by them.

The results of my TPI were that my dominant type is the Apprenticeship model (37) followed by Transmission (32) then Nurturing (31). Social Reform and Developmental came last each with (27). Overall these results don't surprise me. I've grown up in a very black and white field and environment, and my foundational training, as an enlisted man in the Army, was a very black and white, drill heavy, training environment. I naturally used the principles of instructions I learned in the Army and used them in my industrial services and construction career, and these have created and influenced my perspectives, or my "philosophical orientations to knowledge, learning, and the role and responsibility of being a teacher" as Pratt defines his perspectives (2002, p. 9).

Safety and craft skills training is very cut and dry, "do it this way or you could get hurt," type of training. It's perfect for both the Transmission and Apprenticeship models.  I'm not surprised that Apprenticeship is higher than Transmission. I would bet that I had taken this TPI five or ten years ago that Transmission would have ranked higher. Moving further up the corporate ladder has led my training and teaching styles into new directions, more focus on emotional intelligence and fostering for and mentoring the supervisors beneath me, ergo my perspective has changed as well. In classrooms I've become the facilitator rather than the trainer, and I help to develop understanding of the whole and usually focus on individual relationships. These last few characteristics tie into the third highest score for Nurturing.

I was surprised by the low score for Developmental. I find that I'm constantly trying to Develop and promote those who I teach and work with. Once I researched that a touch more I found the following and it tended to make more sense. "From a Developmental Perspective, effective teaching begins with the learners’ prior knowledge of the content and skills to be learned. Instructors holding a developmental dominant perspective are committed to restructuring how people think about the content" (Pratt & Collins, 2000, p. 4). This is anathema to how we train for safety and craft training. The content is the content and the learner learns it. In many cases we have governing authorities who mandate the class be taught in a certain style, following timetables. Although I might understand the subjective nature of the material, obviously the strictures we work under have affected my beliefs has made the Developmental Perspective a recessive one for me.

In terms of Social Reform, in our community of learning, safety is the social aspect that needs reform. Another article I read summed up the Social Reform Perspective as "the most difficult perspective to describe because it has no single, uniform characteristics or set of strategies. In our research, we found social reform teachers in community development, Native education, AIDS awareness, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the civil rights movement, environmental education, women’s health, labor union education, religious education, and even within such established occupations and professions as automotive repair and medical education" (Pratt, 2002, p. 8). The field I work in, industrial services especially in chemical, oil and gas, could easily be a part of that list of professions in the sentence cited above, but to be more specific, behavior based safety and safety systems in general would be a more apt social reform platform within the industry community and there is a compelling push towards this in many of the larger contracting companies and oil refinery owners. Might we have fewer safety incidents if I encourage all of the trainers on my team to be more deeply committed to that social issue? If each training was created with the idea that it was an instrument for change in this arena and to keep the trainee, their colleagues, and any one on the site safe?

I understand that this TPI must act as a gauge or a bellwether, not a hard and fast dictum. Also, I understand that confirmation bias plays a part in any of these inventories, but it does show me the areas where I might need to tweak my understandings of teaching and learning. How much more successful might I become as a trainer if I focus more on how the learner understands the world and how he will see the information, rather than just serving the information up to him as is? Will that generate more immediate and long-term buy in? Pratt writes, "if teachers are to improve, they must reflect on what they do, why they do it, and on what grounds those actions and intentions are justified" (2002, p. 9). Being able to identify where we can improve and make tweaks to change our perspective as needed, based on the class or learner, would make teachers with that capability far more powerful and effective as knowledge transfer and growth.

Having read about all 5 of Pratt's perspectives I understand and agree with his assessment. As with most things there are shades of grey to be found between the black and white and we evolve and change as we mature and grow as teachers. It's rewarding to have that confirmation and a target of what more can be focused on.  Pratts ability to break down the perspectives and show each perspective as it relates to the learner, the content and the teacher is unique and simple enough to make it hard to argue with. I would like to see how different blends of perspectives would look when those models (the learner, content, and teacher) are applied.

Pratt, D. and Collins, J. (2000). "The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI)," Adult Education Research Conference. https://newprairiepress.org/aerc/2000/papers/68 (Links to an external site.)

Pratt, D. (2002).Good teaching: one size fits all? In An Up-date on Teaching Theory, Jovita Ross-Gordon (Ed.), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Publishers.