Taking Inventory

The following post was made for the first week of EDLD 5368 - Instructional Design after having taken a Teaching Style Inventory and Learning Style Inventory. These inventories can be found online here and here. Feel free to take them and see where your tendencies are.


From the teaching style inventory, I realized my worst fear...that my teaching style very closely resembles the style that I was brought up in...rote memorization, regurgitation of facts as assessment, and individual students working on projects with a predetermined "correct" outcome. After reading through the instructional theories database (2010), my style would mostly lean toward the objectivism/behaviorism theory. Fortunately I'm not a classroom teacher, so I don't (yet) have to worry about boring children with this teaching style.

I've thought a bit about why this would be so, and I've always felt that if a person has a strong foundation in fundamentals, he will be successful and competitive against even the most creative opponent. While this may be true, there comes a point where focusing too much on the fundamentals takes all the "fun" out of learning. A teacher must be willing to move on and allow students use that fundamental knowledge at higher levels.

As Bransford, et al, found from Lehrer and Chazan, "in classrooms using a form of "cognitively guided" instruction in geometry, second-grade children’s skills for representing and visualizing three-dimensional forms exceeded those of comparison groups of undergraduate students at a leading university . Young children have also demonstrated powerful forms of early algebraic generalization (Lehrer and Chazan, 1998). " (2000)

And so the onus is now on teachers and administrators to find out the teaching styles of their instructors and ensure that they are not - like me - holding the children at the fundamental level and instead are asking the leading questions and assigning the open-ended projects that will allow children to expand upon learning to a higher level.

Dabbagh. N. (2006). The instructional design knowledge base. Retrieved on March 18, 2010, from http://classweb.gmu.edu/ndabbagh/Resources/IDKB/models_theories.htm

Bransford, J.,Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (Ed.). (2000). How people learn. pp. 129-154 (Chapter 6). Washington DC: National Academy Press. Retrieved on March 18, 2010, at http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9853&page=131#p2000495f9970131001