The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI)

The teaching of adults is a complex, pluralistic, and multi-faceted enterprise, but there have been no published studies that beyond identification and description of perspectives toward measurement and quantitative forms of validation. This paper traces our progress toward developing and operationalizing five common perspectives on teaching adults with a new instrument called the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) Over a half-century of research has revealed that the teaching of adults is a complex, pluralistic, and multi-faceted enterprise. Yet within the past several years much of the research has shown a surprisingly high level of correspondence in identifying qualitatively different perspectives on teaching. For example, in reviewing thirteen studies conducted between 1983 and 1996, Kember (1997) found only five substantively different views of teaching in higher education. All of those studies found that people conceived of teaching in ways that were remarkable similar to one or more of five perspectives on teaching. Thus, while there may be a great many variations in personal style, there seem to be relatively few substantively different ways to conceptualize the teaching of adults, at least in the context of higher education. To date, there have been no published studies that move this work beyond identif ication and description toward measurement and quantitative forms of validation. This paper traces our progress toward developing and operationalizing five common perspectives on teaching adults with a new instrument called the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI). Conceptual Framework This work is grounded in the empirical and conceptual work of Pratt (1992; 1998). Four of his perspectives closely parallel conceptions found in Kember’s review. A fifth perspective, Social Reform, was kept intact for this study because it represented the views of a small but important group of adult educators involved in social change movements. We have taken these conceptual categories (Table 1 Summary of Perspectives) and translated them into items related to actions, intentions, and beliefs about learning, teaching, and knowledge. As they are now defined and operationalized, the five perspectives are labeled Transmission, Apprenticeship, Developmental, Nurturing and Social Reform. Instrument Development Instrument development has evolved through successive stages of operationalizing Pratt’s five perspectives into five scales concerning actions, intentions, and beliefs related to teaching. Starting with an initial 75-item, 6-point scale version and culminating in a 45-item, 5-point scale version. In 1993, an original pool of nearly one hundred items was reviewed and refined by a panel of trained adult educators acting as judges, who tested them against the conceptual framework; their inter-judge reliability in assigning items to the correct conceptual perspective was .87. The resulting 75 items were initially drafted into 6-point Likert-scale formats for response by 471 teachers of adult night school learners. Item analyses confirmed high testretest reliabilities (.88) and internal scale consistencies (alpha=.79). Factor analyses showed that the internal structure among the items corroborated the scale scoring as posited by the item development procedures with correlations between factor scores and scale scores averaging .77. Of these teachers, 63% possessed one clearly dominant perspective and another 31% showed two dominant perspectives (Chan, 1994). In 1997, a new group of eighteen adult educators reviewed a reduced and refined set of 45 items and classified them into the appropriate perspectives with over 95% accuracy. Their review indicated that the instrument could be further shortened without loss of precision (Table 2 – Sample Items). This 45-item streamlined version has been further tested on more than 25 groups of teachers of adults in law, pharmacy, dietetics, workforce training, nursing, industry, fitness, as well as on adult education graduate students and in locations spanning Canada, the United States and Singapore. These 1000+ respondents confirm the high internal consistencies of the streamlined instrument’s five scales: alpha reliabilities are Transmission .81, Apprenticeship .88, Developmental .85, Nurturance .92, Social Reform .82 and the overall internal consistency is .80. More importantly, it shows that when teachers examine their own profiles, they recognize themselves and furthermore, colleagues recognize each others’ orientations to teaching as represented in the profiles yielded by the TPI. When teachers’ perspectives scores are correlated with their rating of short, one-paragraph descriptors of the five perspectives (Table 1), there are moderate and significant correlations between their scale scores and the descriptive paragraphs—in other words, teachers’ TPI scores validate their selfdescriptions. Findings In total, more than 1000 respondents have thus far contributed to establishing baseline norms. As a result, respondents’ individual scores can now be compared against norms of large numbers of teachers of adults (Table 3 Sample Profile) and specific occupational groups (Table 4 Dominant Perspective by Occupation). Across all who have taken the TPI, mid-range scores are common for Apprenticeship, Developmental and Nurturing, with somewhat lower scores common for Transmission. Still lower scores characterize the Social Reform Perspective, indicating that individuals are less committed to Social Reform (see the 50 percentile bar in Figure 3). Among their individual scores, teachers of adults commonly possess one, and sometimes two, dominant perspectives, that is, perspectives with scores one standard deviation or more above their personal mean—the mean of all five of their TPI scores. They also commonly hold one perspective as ‘recessive,’ indicating their score on that perspective is one or more standard deviations below their personal mean. Teachers that are newer in their careers, and those still in training, tend to have higher Nurturing scores. Teachers whose learners are comparatively older show somewhat lower Nurturing scores. Professionals with greater fractions of their job duties devoted to teaching show higher Developmental and Nurturing scores (Table 4 – Dominant Perspectives by Occupation). None of the scales show gender biases (Collins, 1998). Not surprisingly, the largest single fraction of teachers indicate Nurturing as their dominant perspective (43.7%); and as expected, less than two percent of all respondents held Social Reform as their dominant perspective. However, of the 1000+ TPI respondents, only 11% held a dominant Developmental orientation to teaching—a finding that seems to contradict the conventional discourse about constructivist orientations to learning and teaching. Some 16.9% showed Transmission as dominant, 20.8% showed Apprenticeship, and 5.8% showed no dominant perspective. An additional 200+ post-baccalaureate students in teacher education programs are at the beginning stages of a four-year longitudinal study to better understand the effects of formal training and subsequent entry into professional practice on the development of teaching perspectives. We are also following twelve university faculty members for four years to better understand changes in their or ientation to teaching both during and following a formal training certificate program in higher education teaching. Discussion Over the past five years there has been a resurgence of interest in teaching in adult and higher education. In adult education, this can be seen in the increased presence of papers on teaching within the proceedings of CASAE, AERC, and SCUTREA. Within higher education this resurgence is evident in the emergence of centres for faculty development and teaching at colleges and universities around the world. Once again, teaching has reclaimed a place of honor in adult and higher education. At the same time, there is a call for teachers of adults to be critically reflective in their practice of teaching. For several years now professions have pushed for their members to reflect critically on the underlying assumptions and values that give direction and justification to their work. For many teachers this is not an easy task. What is it that one should reflect upon? How are the underlying values and assumptions to be identified? In other words, the objects of critical reflection are not self-evident. Indeed, it is something of a new twist to look not only at the world, but at the very lenses through which we view the world. The Teaching Perspectives Inventory gives direction to the process of critical reflection by providing a baseline of information as well as articulating teachers’ own beliefs about learning, knowledge, and the social role of “teacher.” Initial work with the groups mentioned above suggests that the TPI provides a means of tracking and looking more deeply at the underlying values and assumptions that constitute teachers’ perspectives on teaching. The TPI also provides a wellarticulated basis from which to justify and defend approaches to teaching when under review or evaluation. Table 1: Summary of Five Perspectives on Teaching Transmission From a Transmission Perspective, effective teaching assumes instructors will have mastery over their content. Those who see Transmission as their dominant perspective are committed, sometimes passionately, to their content or subject matter. They believe their content is a relatively well-defined and stable body of knowledge and skills. It is the learners’ responsibility to master that content. The instructional process is shaped and guided by the content. It is the teacher’s primary responsibility to present the content accurately and efficiently to learners. Apprenticeship From an Apprenticeship Perspective, effective teaching assumes that instructors will be experienced practitioners of what they are teaching. Those